Okay, maybe not a sane company, given the story, but there are plenty of places without the toxic culture you describe above.
I got told off more than once for showing initiative and pushing something forward that wasn't on the approved list for the sprint even though I had time and there wasn't anything left to pick up.
Yes, mobbing fans, I know, I could have jumped in on a story that already had people working on it. This is what management there said to me as well.
Nevertheless I'm rather old fashioned so I have two comments to make:
1) Too many cooks... etc.
2) Adding more people to a project/story that's not going to deliver on time will only make it later. (Here I'm obviously paraphrasing Fred Brooks.) And if it's going to deliver on time then why add more people instead of enabling those people to work on something else that's useful?
In the end I gave notice without any plan about what to do next but had three opportunities lined up before I'd worked my notice period and have been much happier since.
On the flip side, every once in a while in the fish-shell GitHub repo we get an idiot that files an issue titled “is this even maintained?” because there is a non-zero number of opened issues (or I file a bug on GH and the the repo owner closes it immediately as “will revisit later” so the issue count doesn’t go up).
It’s not a technology problem. It’s a people problem.
Although this person is the hero of the story, I feel obligated to point out that in today's JIRA-driven "what have you done for me lately" close-the-stories what's-your-velocity we're-about-to-downsize-so-you'd-better-prove-you're-valuable culture of "efficiency", the person who did this either had a LOT of job security (as in, compromising photos of the CEO in a public bathhouse job security) or did this on their own time while spending their "working hours" closing tickets and attending conference calls.