There should be representation in management from every realm in which a company does battle on a complex field. A technical company should have strong representation from engineering, but it cannot and should not neglect lawyers in various specialties (tax, tort, labor) and include those knowledgable in finance, marketing and (when applicable) the supply chain. The members should ALL have "leadership" pixie dust. A companies leaders need to have insight and experience in every domain in which the firm faces either existential threat or growth opportunity.

I think the takeaway should be that if we want Western economies to keep growing, we need to cut these useless rich bureaucrats out and give power to the engineers.

I don't think that is necessarily true. But if you are non-technical, you need people advising you that are technical and actually listen to their advice.

You don’t need to be a technical engineer to be a good leader.

But financial engineering is often at odds with real engineering and can harm the product.

Why? They're a business like any other, albeit with high depreciation in some product lines.

Check out X these days. There is this "founder mode" meme that is about company founders are the culprit of growing bigger and fix how the company works.

Imho this is bullshit. It is not about being the founder, but most people just cannot change their ways of working. Like hired managers would not be able with the same chance. At the same time, when founders or engineers cannot change to accomodate some business reality, only time will tell wether they can and manage to lead through that - or the McKinsey usual mantra "selling off unprofitable business unit" would have been proved better.