That's completely different than being your enemy.
What you want to avoid are work environments where most workers are focused on gaming internal politics to get ahead. Those environments are soul destroying.
But that's not all work environments. And most work environments are some mix of internal politics and wanting to actually create good and useful products.
Employees (middle management and down) are explicitly structured to use salaries (to reduce costs/earnings from going to them).
Salary is generally a flat monetary incentive, and bonuses aren't big enough typically. You make more money by promotion up a rigid hierarchy: so that is the true motivation.
And that is politics.
If you have salaries, you have politics, and a downward trend towards more of them.
Engineering workers are often idealistic, which is a different set of motivations to exploit by management for monetary advantage. But idealism/creation leads to turf wars and emotional investment in "your code", which is another entire axis of politics.
This is not true at all. Far more important in upper management is ego - they will lose money to improve their legacy or beat a competitor.
> If you have salaries, you have politics, and a downward trend towards more of them
Nobody said politics do not exist.
So let’s take what you said at face value - management is paying for jobs but they are looking to cut costs, etc.
Is that arrangement something you can use to benefit your life for a season? Or an inherent war zone?