I believe it's a problem in most industries and even humanity in general. I don't believe it's a business problem at all.
Heroes are lauded even if they solve problems they themselves are the cause of - which is conveniently either forgotten or denied - or they are solving non-issues that are deemed important by the ignorami-class. Politics, for example, is utterly dominated by this dynamic.
It's the first instinct: let the expert run the show. However, one of the (many) ways to let a complex project fall apart completely is to hand over full control to engineers. I'm one myself, but I know what I'm good at and what not. Dunning-Kruger is often mentioned in these discussions, but don't forget it also applies to engineers that often lack any management or leadership experience of any appreciable kind. They vastly overestimate their ability to handle management and organization-wide issues and tend to not only miss the forest for the trees but actually miss the trees for the leaves.
"Unix: A History and a Memoir" by Brian Kernighan actually mentions how proper management was crucial to their success. It's a detail that's frequently conveniently forgotten by the engineers who think themselves better than the "suits". For the record, I don't claim engineers are the primary problem, but it's not just management's either. Quotes like "who holds the company standing" and "who understands how to double click" are enormous smells and IMO make quite clear what's happening here.
I don't have ready-made solutions unfortunately, but I do wish we would look further than "it's the suits". It's a systemic, human problem that I believe is a natural result of operating under informational constraints and, very human, cognitive biases on all sides.
Bell Labs is an outlier in basically every aspect. Mr Kernighan lists stability of the environment with regard to funding, structure, mission as well as technical competence of the management as main drivers of the culture. This is just not the reality in companies that look for financial results on a quarterly basis and where the executives are MBA types.
If one of the most successful engineering organizations in history attributes part of its success to capable management, that undermines simplistic narratives where management is inherently the problem and engineers would naturally thrive if left alone.
If anything, the Bell Labs example supports the idea that exceptional outcomes require both strong technical talent and strong management working together.
Not saying the "MBAs" are helping the situation, but the hero developers and their resume driven development practices aren't exactly angels either.
Capable is the loadbearing word, the directors were all PhDs in math, science and engineering fields.
I dont subscribe to the strawman argument that engineers would naturally strive on their own, but neither does simply any form of management automatically add value.
I agree also that hero type devs are an indicator of problems