Look, there is an essential difference between what is an engineer and what is a technical person. The later want direction, projects broken into epics and then stories, and wants steps. Engineers can make that structure and work better in ill defined problem areas. That's not a flaw. What is a flaw is when tech never progresses to engineer. That's bad for the individual, team, company, and client. Leadership then (in the drucker or tqm sense) is important. Look at IBM pre/post gernster and Microsoft pre/post balmer.

In short rigidity on the part of individuals combined with countervailing organizational goals to combatting same is the issue.