Social organisms usually have some sort of ordering hierarchy. While most of the 'alpha' and 'sigma-grindset' nonsense is just that -- nonsense -- people are hierarchical animals.

It also means you don't need to give a damn about stuff that's above or below your paygrade. You do your hours on X, and other teams can worry about Y.

> a lot of devs have very little experience of what life looks like with engineers at the helm

A lot of devs have very little experience in a lot of fields. The best programmers I've met started coding at 15, went to MIT, and have been in software their whole lives; they have no paradigm outside of what they've been exposed to during their college-intern-jr.dev phases. Most of em that I know haven't ever worked a job flipping burgers or washing cars, either.

Makes it hard to break out of that mentality, and also means that a lot of very smart coders do piss-poor jobs managing & leading. Inevitably the shitty engineer-managers fail, and the business types are dragged back in.

I've done this as a new dev. In the end a few new devs aren't going to change things against stubborn old talent and a large swat of new devs passively standing by, until the proof is there. But that's the exact problem: these systems are so large, you need people to be willing to risk extrapolating a PoC or be willing to invest until the proof is there right in front of their eyes. With how risk-averse most companies are, the odds of this happening are miniscule. Unless you wish to invest your own time, effort and risk (which I don't think should be the answer, despite how often it is given).