I have seen CEOs and CTOs tearing apart feedback from surveys at all-hands meetings. To the point of mocking answers and saying people are "tripping", or that "in other YC companies people work 80 hours".
And I've seen leads/managers leaving due to micromanagement as well.
As long as the expectation is for managers to hide concerns and fall in line, the information will be hidden from C-levels.
For example:
> A fintech company decided to build their own authentication system rather than use established solutions.
I lived this exact scenario. Fintech wanted custom authentication! It was pushed into my team. I said no and put my foot down, VPE disagreed with me and gave to another team. That team failed to deliver after 6 months, and my team finally ended up being the one implementing a third-party solution in a couple weeks. That third-party solution costed less than $100 per month, because of how little users we had.
On my yearly feedback I still got knocked down a peg due to this incident. It really hurt my career at that company, even though I was in the right. That other team failed to deliver other projects too, and we got the same feedback I did, same salary increase. I got the yelling, I got the negative marks.
Of course people will rationalize this with "you should have been more political".
Well, that's what the people being criticized in TFA are doing: being political.