If you are in an organization filled with vindictive employees, I recommend terminating them all if you have the power, or finding a new place to work. Not everyone can be part of the A-team. Trying to constantly appease those who feel entitled to the highest levels of the software engineering ivory tower will never end in a good outcome for the organization and will dis-incentivize those who actually bust their ass every day.

Finding and terminating toxic employees is the single best thing every company should do to improve its health, but few do. Probably because some of the most toxic people are very skilled at looking good to their superiors while causing huge amounts of damage.

I think that's not how it'd work. Instead, those vindictive people would be managers, and they'd be the ones that provided you with information, and based on what they said, maybe statistics they show, it'd seem like obviously good ideas to scrap those projects