I dont think the solution to not knowing people in your company is to create bureaucracy. Ie - only hanging with 10 executives and a focus group. Get out there and talk to people for a few minutes - at the office or wherever.
They knew everyone in the school (ebery teacher and about 500+ student names), and what happened in every class. It took time and talent to do it, but it made them a lot less insulated.
Claiming you can't know 100-200 people - your high school teacher wrote 100 reports. Now obviously they aren't 100% on the ball, but they have some idea (I hope).
There's an old story about how Bill Gates once took a call in tech support. A far larger organisation, and he still was willing to dive deep and see what was going on at the least glamorous part of the coalface.
There's a difference between trying to micromanage everything, and micromanaging enough that you're not out of touch.
Feedback is a two way street. It both let's you know what is happening, and let's the people below know that you actually care. Even if you can't (and arguably shouldn't) be everywhere at once, it has its place.
Now yes, it's drive by management and isn't the main tool that a manager should use, but being overly scared that your trusted expert juniors will be destroyed by a senior checking up on them is maybe a bit silly, and if a senior manager is such a tool that they do cause havoc just by looking over someone's shoulder and giving them a bit of feedback you're already in trouble.
Inulation isn't the answer IMO, just accepting that yes you don't need to know everyone and everything to the same level as if it was a small team.
While leaders can't know everyone they should make it a priority to have those random connections outside their inner circle. If they don't, they become in danger of hearing only the info that their inner circle wants them to hear.
As quality issues become fewer, the odds increase that inspecting a small number of products at random will lead to you thinking that there are zero quality issues. Have your inspections procedure scale and adapt to the relative proportion of quality issues you have reason to believe exist. And if you believe you truly have zero quality issues, then you need to switch to an immediate feedback procedure (such as an anonymous tip line, or a non-anonymous one for customer feedback).
I think there's a good point to be made here that this isn't micromanaging, it's bypassing feedback layers that have a tendency to filter out critical or important information. That information may or may not be withheld intentionally, but being Bill Gates and seeing that a crucial tool to help a customer doesn't work very fast, or is missing information, or relies on "hacks" (tribal knowledge on how to bypass restrictions or flags) to keep the support process going would be something that wouldn't filter upwards easily.
Definitely a balance to be had though for sure.
I rather have her not talking to me, because it's much worse knowing she fakes her openness, than actually just not showing up.
In the worst case, they only want to present as open to feedback, while they are using that feedback to build the list of detractors who will be laid off, not promoted, etc. And this kind of personal feedback can really trigger this sort of person.