You've described my experience exactly.
The amount of money that "enterprises" will spend in order to avoid hiring actual competent people is staggering. They quite literally spend orders of magnitude more than just hiring people, always end up with mixed results and have no ownership over the things they depend on.
I've also seen several cases where these companies maintain a "predatory" relationship: they build some big convoluted Thing of dubious quality and utility, and then, as a result of the hiring company refusing to invest in employees of any expertise, they either pay the same company to "maintain" or "add features" to The Thing, or worse, they hire another outsourcing firm to do that.
My favorite experience was working with a large F500 that outsourced (effectively) 100% of their IT--the internal staff were basically "yappers", people that just attending meetings and said things like "we'll have to ensure this meets security standards" but did no actual implementation work and had no intimacy with anything developed.
The irony, of course, is that attempting to get answers about any of the complex stuff that their employer ostensibly owned was an exercise in futility: "oh you have to ask the 'platform'/'data'/whatever team (another subcontractor or several)". I was under the impression no actual employee at the company knew, in any material way, how any of the stuff the business depended on worked, beyond whatever prepared slide deck they were given.
They'd have zero useful technical input on any solution, only occasionally quipping with some sort of canned platitudes: "we use dotnet internally", right, sure.
Utterly bizarre, and not, I fear, unique.