this not making any sense to you is exactly why companies are implementing these caps: you lack the business acumen to understand how financial resources should actually be deployed.
Claiming you have no idea why the managers had to do this felt to me like avoiding any responsibility
Our policy is quite permissive for exactly the reasons I conveyed above. It takes an extremely finely-tuned sense of value and high assurance that you’re on the diminishing return portion of the curve to conclude “SWEs should have this precisely metered amount (rather than zero or ‘as much as they don’t waste’)”
My claiming to have no idea was not an abdication of responsibility but rather a claim that it was likely an error (assuming a non-trivial team size and a business that can continue to grow).