Everyone should have a voice but not everyone needs to literally be at the table. Seeing companies go from small to larger and seeing how the flat structure begins to show caveats as a team grows, I agree everyone should have a voice, but ultimately a decision needs to be made and a big group of people are never going to agree on everything. You can bikeshed all day on which CI platform to use for example but ultimately a decision gets made by someone that there has been enough discussion and this is the platform to use.
That process can be horribly perverted and have the wrong people making terrible decisions but that is a separate problem, not a problem with the idea of consolidating many voices into a decision.
Else, as first poster said, the process is tyrannical.
Not every business decision requires every single persons input either, and although you may be affected that doesn't mean your input was as valuable as everyone elses. The CI team's choices might affect my branching structure. Tough, that is their responsibility. If it's extremely detrimental then you can raise concerns, talk to people, get out of your seat and work with the humans around you.
We don't need another revolutionary management fad, where a hundred employees sit around a satiricaly large table and vote by show of hands. That works amazingly at small companies and it's why I prefer to work at them. But let's get real, management at scale is hard.
Ultimately though, if you feel like you don't have a voice where you are, work to get a voice, or find a company with a structure that works for you.
It honestly depends on how much skin I have in the game.
The founder of my company spent years using his own money and getting personal loans to fund it. So the decisions that he makes directly impacts him.
A lot of the managers here also grew with the company and have invested years of time and money.
For me, this is just a job. It's a good job, but I wouldn't really be willing to sacrifice anything for it. I would leave for another job before it came to that.
I think a more fair way might be how law firms set up partnerships. If you want to be a decision making member, you have to put in a substantial amount of money.
At the end of the day, the "subordinates" are the ones actually doing the far majority of the work, and they far outnumber the managers. I don't see why the workers shouldn't at least have a seat at the table when the decisions are being debated that would affect them. Often the managers are so removed from the work that they lack a lot of the insights from the front lines.
The most common rebuttal I hear when I bring this up is, like you said, "too many people makes things inefficient". Bullshit. Sure a decision ultimately needs to be made, but there's no reason one shouldn't be allowed to provide input.
And in my experience, I do think it's more about people wanting to feel powerful, and fear of losing this power (eg. like the other commenter who mentioned fear of "power inversion"). The people in power are generally the most sycophantic, and thus have the least interest in interacting with or relinquishing power to subordinates because it doesn't personally benefit their position of power or ladder-climbing question.
If a bunch of executives make a bad decision, then "oh well, there's no way we could've known". If a bunch of executives make a bad decision after a meeting with subordinates who questioned their decision, then it makes the executives look bad and threatens their judgement and position of authority. So from a selfish perspective, it's better to keep the minions out.