I've been in those companies where "struggling departments" ended up getting all the praises and raise in budgets the following quarter because of the heroic saves they did, and raising awareness on how important they are... For stuff they totally caused on themselves. Meanwhile, my perfectly purring department was struggling to keep the lights on. It's a serious problem in this industry due to the disconnect between…
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.