It's not necessarily about anything shady though, it can just as easily be legitimate differences of opinion, too many cooks in the kitchen, bikeshedding, or landgrab concerns.

You are right, I'm a bit cynical here. But that's what makes the phrase brilliant - it can be used for both and it's hard to figure out which one it is on the spot.

How did you verify this was the case every time you heard it?

What sort of information could cause confusion in the workplace, exactly?

Excluding private HR data obviously.

You go from focusing on executing a well defined strict set of tasks that closely fit your brag worthy skills to pondering a partially defined set of fuzzy "more important" goals that poorly fit your skills while unsure if your noob input would either make you look like an idiot or be very valuable.

The problem is that it's very hard to convey subtlety & uncertainty. Sometimes the truth is "we may go in one of these 3 ways so we have to cover our bases to be able to go in either once we do know" but people (especially programmers) want to hear "we will do exactly x and it will not change in the short term".

EDIT: I think this is a good way of phrasing it https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32630650