As someone who has been in both tech IC (individual contributor) and higher management levels, this is often a relatively simple result of impedance mismatch (excluding bad faith individuals for now): ICs and lower level managers are all about inputs and outputs, blocking and tackling, getting shit done. At the higher management levels it is all about setting direction, setting the "tone", "getting the culture right"…
Even mid managers have expressed similar concerns to me about finding it difficult to work with tech. E.g., a product manager has complained to me that they wanted a feature built which would have had a direct revenue impact but were stuck because the tech team wanted to "triage" which she didn't understand. Sounds to me that we need a "tech-to-normal" language translator.
Perhaps we're misinterpreting and the team was just stonewalling. That happens sometimes with certain teams, sometimes it's because they're chronically understaffed. However, that's obviously no representative of the "tech" (i.e. software) role as a whole.