Can you effectively work with leadership you don't trust?

This exact situation caused me to burn out hard as a dev.

Had a thick-as-dogshit “product owner” with absolutely no technical skills, no vision, just fucking clueless and arrogant.

I cared and tried to make “good decisions” but they sabotaged the project. Then they scapegoated me to leadership when the project was dogwater.

As others have said, this is par for the course. Competence all around you -- in most places -- is at best a transient phenomena, if you're a top 25% thinker. Assuming you are a top thinker, and you want to be challenged, then you could -- and should -- try to join an elite team elsewhere (e.g. FAANG+), but these opportunities are scarce and not equally available to all of us.

A more general strategy would be to realise what you can do is conditional on the world as it is, and try to make the best of that, improving incrementally as the opportunities arise. But this of course curtails a mind that is trying to produce the best its capacities will allow it.

I think that "making the best of it" is what most of "us" end up doing by the time we are in our 40s, and I would conjecture that here on HN you will find far more beautiful flowers that never blossomed than those that took their full bloom, for much the same reasons you mentioned, and the adaptions given above.