> In my experience most engineers have the best intentions and want to do the best work possible

I agree, most of them do - but I've also been in a place that highers the best of the best, and despite the best intentions, some people cannot put their ego aside and the overall result is between less-than-ideal and downright-horrible

I disagree (unless your "bad environment" gets tautologically redefined to mean any place where people with good intentions don't get good results.... which you might).

I was working in a place that employed incredibly smart and capable but highly opinionated people, and did not treat them as cogs, and did let them influence their productivity, happiness, and quality of the code.

However, there was a major philosophical disagreement between the "functional programming" camp and the "object oriented" camp (with a minor "procedural programming" camp), and designs occasionally became "I am smarter than you" contests, the overall system being extremely incoherent because every side wss able to influence their own productivity.

It worked, because they were smart. It was not a bad environment for any single person. But it would have been a much better place for everyone if there was a benevolent dictator (but nevertheless, dictator) who enforced one way or the other - the randomly reached middle ground has all of the deficiencies of all approaches, and none of the benefits.

If "it worked" and "was not a bad environment", I really don't see the issue here (unless your "it worked" gets redefined to mean "it didn't work"... which you might). Sounds like a nice and intellectually stimulating environment, and that they had best intentions. Honestly, someone wanting a dictator has bigger ego problems than those people.

Very long onboarding, impedance mismatches everywhere, tons of unneeded glue logic. Lots of consternation. It worked in the sense that it wasn’t a failure like a significant number of software projects. It could have worked significantly better if the people involved didn’t feel they needed to show off.

And my model for A dictator is Linus Thorvald, Guiro van Rossum, Andreas Rumpf; if you can’t appreciate the management model and abilities that a benevolent dictator brings, we will just have to agree to disagree.