This was the case at an engineering company I worked with for several years.

The committee, or "enterprise architects" as they called themselves, became too far removed from the trenches, and the devs viewed them as sitting in an ivory tower and passing down ridiculous decrees.

They brought this view upon themselves, as they made it more or less impossible to even speak to them - almost all communication was through requests and forms uploaded to a sharepoint site!

They kept taking it further and further, until you even needed their permission to take a dependency on a 3rd party library for a LoB app. Such requests would sometimes take weeks to get a response.

We could never hold on to devs for long, in large part because they hated working under this bureaucratic nightmare.

The committee made all sorts of terrible decisions, always without consulting the devs and always with little justification, and these had a lasting impact for years to come.

Gods, it was horrible!

it's senior managements job to make sure the dev leads are working well

Basically this is senior / middle management in every company

you had senior management that have not realised the importance of software to their business - so they let a situation develop they would never allow in sales or accounts

IME, this right here should have seen the entire committee fired.

Thankfully it's a lot nicer these days - but I still wouldn't use it as a platform on which to build a web app (yes, we were forced, under great duress to do that - and the result was as awful as you'd expect).