At the last large traditional place I was at it seemed a lot like the upper management types had put these gatekeepers in place so they had people that would pander to them. The amount of times one of them told me they couldn't tell their boss some bad news for risk of getting fired or chewed out, but wouldn't let me go and tell them the truth was mad.

From what I could tell no-one was firing engineers because it was too expensive and we didn't really care since we could get more work within a few hours, and the "bosses" didn't like the lack of power they had in that dynamic.