Demanding and exercising the use of a throat to choke is a massive, massive part of how at least American business works due to prevailing leadership styles as well. It also shows how they tend to view their workers as well. "Blameless culture" is something that is a tiny, tiny minority that only seems to have worked out well among socialist-ish boutique software companies and until we start seeing companies that practice traditional Taylorist and authoritarian leader worship cultures fail very disproportionately, nothing will fundamentally change.
I'm familiar with a number of very large deals done basically between C-level to C-level where the scope of IT projects has nothing to do with technologies but entire about cost savings - literally "I will save you $n MM / yr in opex so you can get your bonuses" and other vendors get shut out. Sometimes these deals work out, other times they don't and the executive is basically ousted. Companies with bad politics and enormous cronyism may have worked fine for decades, but they just may not be doing as well anymore unless you're on Wall Street and you make so much money it doesn't matter how it's done.
Software is not the end-goal itself. The point is not to make (or use) amazingly elegant software. The point is to make money.
If a supplier says "I will provide the same service as you are currently getting and cost you $X less" then that's a no-brainer regardless of what service they're providing. It's got nothing to do with technology, and technology doesn't change the nature of that decision.
"Having a throat to choke" is also a matter of insurance. You can't insure against your own incompetence, but you can sue a supplier for not fulfilling the terms of their contract. Executives would much rather negotiate what they think is a tough contract with a supplier than manage a complex project themselves. To that mindset, the removal of risk (because if anything goes wrong they can sue the supplier) is a huge bonus.
It's a totally different mindset from those of us who actually make things.
This is why I swore to only write software at software companies some years ago. For other industries software is just another expense like buildings or supplies. The people buying it have no idea what they're looking at so they buy the shiny thing that everyone else is buying.
When I worked in other sectors I regularly saw executives attempt to assemble software as if it was a large building. Materials were gathered, agreements were made to purchase or rent heavy equipment, and the whole project was planned out with exacting detail. When all the permits and contracts were in place construction would begin. This was to be done in a measured amount of code using the chosen architecture, and delivered complete on a certain date. Any deviations were seen as workarounds for not following the original plans, and overruns the result of incompetence. The whole thing was just a shitshow of incompetence at the higher levels.