...which, sadly, is true of many larger organizations: "security" ends up as just another middle management approval committee whose only job is to apply byzantine security checklists dreamed up by some Certified Security Architect (tm) way too late in the development process, right when it's hardest for product teams to reshuffle their entire architecture to comply, and with no consideration to the actual circumstances / risk profile of specific projects.

IMHO this should be viewed as a big, glaring anti-pattern, as it fundamentally puts security team goals at odds with product team goals.

Agreed.

...Which sounds like a management problem.

Agreed.