I have a decorated history of calling people on their bullshit. I have the 'you have been let go' and negative resume references to prove it.

The fool is the person not understanding the game they're playing.

Techies who do other people's work are perpetuating the game they despise - they are indeed fools.

Middle managers who perpetuate the game are smart, because it is their job to perpetuate the game. It is not their job to change the rules of the game - that's the job of the techies who can refuse to 'pick up the slack', let targets fail repeatedly and signal to upper management that the game isn't working, forcing them to change the game, which the middle managers will once again perpetuate, because that is their job.

I called someone out, and pushed back on someone who wanted me to do their work. This was a useless "scrum master" type who couldn't even update a spreadsheet for one of his weekly reports. I explained to him that that updating those spreadsheets was not an engineering responsibility, but I would be happy to provide him with input. I also complained about him to my manager. He was one of those guys who couldn't even copy-and-paste.

They just harassed some other person into doing it. He was a bit passive aggressive about it on some future calls: "Bob doesn't want to update the spreadsheet, so I will have Alice do it!" Anyway, nice guy, but didn't do any work at all, and he's gone now.