It places the blame on EPMs because EPMs are just the bearer of bad news, middlemen who carry out the whims of the UI Gods and VPs. The original commenter couldn't see those above the EPMs, the ones overseeing the BRBs and other inquisitions.
If this is atypical, I'm terrified to ever leave my large engineering organization - it's a pretty great model for the work we do.
Sounds like really healthy practice
Even working somewhere, sure, you'll know what the adjacent teams in your org are like, and maybe you'll meet some internal transfers, but the truth is you have no idea what life is like for the thousands you'll never meet. There might be broad strokes that differentiate the company from its peers, but only the vaguest outline is going to be universally or even mostly true.
Given Apple has a pile of cash so large it could do pretty much anything it wants... and have had for several years now... I’ve begun viewing their continued unwillingness to aggressively pursue opinion B as a failure of “upper middle management” who are clearly either suppressing the needs coming up from below, or in the very least, not pushing hard enough to their bosses that their teams are under resourced for achieving the companies goals.
I'm a former iOS EPM (not speaking for Apple, obviously, since I don't work there anymore), and although the Reddit commenter got the atmosphere of constant crisis right, he/she is misplacing the blame and misunderstanding the power dynamic. EPMs at Apple essentially have zero power over engineers' workload. They take the list of stuff the engineering managers said they want to get done this year and say "You guys are crazy, you'll never be able to do this without 3x the hours/manpower." Then they proceed to drive the team as hard as necessary to make sure that they actually deliver what they said they were going to deliver. That's it. The idea that there is this cabal of mighty EPMs twirling their mustaches and loading developers down with work is pretty far from reality.
It's true that you shouldn't be working on anything not in Radar (the bug tracker) but this is true anywhere you'll work. Project managers however do not sign developers up for all those radars--on the contrary--we're usually trying desperately to help you get rid of scope and get the task list down to what's actually do-able!
One of the great things that IMHO sets Apple apart is how engineering-driven they are. I've never worked anywhere else where engineers had so much freedom to decide what they're working on. The fact that they always decide to work on 3x what they can actually achieve is kind of on them. But that drive to try to do so much is part of what keeps innovation strong at Apple.