I think it's more than lack of experience with great engineering culture. I think bad management is actively incentivized by a spandrel of how our organizations fit together. There's a mismatch between the time it takes to yield measurable impacts and the time scale on which rewards accrue to individuals. Because large and complex projects take time, and are hard to measure, and it's hard to attribute the portion of success or failure to an individual, when three quarters in a manager is promoted to some new position which the CEO thinks desperately needs to be filled, it's off of the narratives the manager has been able to produce, not the actual impact. The tools for making a narrative of competence and success are understandable, punchy process and organizational improvements, cherry-picked measures that don't really mean anything, meetings, 1:1s.

So, when a sequence of directors each wants to "refresh" how the planning and prioritization process works, or reintroduce OKRs because they believe that what the org was doing up until that point was an incorrect, or champion some new set of Principles that obligates all existing projects to re-justify their existence in new terms, or move all project management into a new tool, they're creating a narrative of leadership. And they can tell a good story well before the non-impacts become visible, and without having to examine or deeply understand the technical aspects of what it is they're managing.

In some cases, this can be a modest productivity tax to the impacted teams. Some number of weeks from every quarter gets dedicated to servicing the most recent process changes etc. But sometimes it's actively harmful (creating separate silos for functions that really need to be in close coordination, etc).