>The vast majority of people have not worked in managerial positions with high levels of responsibility to understand the decision-making and interest balancing processes required for a large organization to operate.

There are some of us who have and still see the facades and illogical reasoning for many decisions, decisions that if made in the lower wrung of the company would definitely lead to someone getting fired. People ignore good evidence even at the highest levels all the time because their incentives are not aligned, for example. I witnessed this before. I've been in director+ levels multiple times, at small and medium organizations. I'm not convinced that my peers were any smarter than lower level employees when it comes to making decisions given all the available inputs.

I will say, that in mid sized organizations I've been apart of, you do see sometimes that lower level employees have no concept outside the department, and that leads to tunnel vision. They don't see the complete story all the time, but I always viewed those as communication failures most of the time.

I "made the sausage" at my previous job reporting directly to the CTO[0] at a 1000+ person company. It was alot more volume of information, and I talked to alot of different people all the time, but I think you could take any whip smart employee, elevate them to that position, and they could do a reasonable job.

That experience has left me really jaded to be honest. Whatever humanity I had left to endure corporate life had sunk by the end, as it were.

[0]: This is why I was raising alarm bells in the first place, because I knew it'd be heard. Fact is, it was ignored.