You have people making coming from the outside, making decisions that would affect rank and file in a company. I think its natural for the rank and file to be biased towards believing in their own skills and dismissing outsiders.
Why would shareholders, the board and the CEO waste so much money on paying consultancies when the only value is being able to pass blame? Isn't it simply easier to believe that consultancies indeed provide valuable judgements and the price paid is worth it?
The risk of doing one thing and complaints hampering the progress there is often too high which is why you give authority to a third party who will just do it regardless of feedback. One time breaks are necessary sometimes but can also be misused a lot for things employees want to do anyway. It's up to leadership to identify what is necessary and not generally possible with the current crew.
Management does it in large part to provide external validation (most importantly to the board and shareholders) of the decisions they sought to take anyway.
The board and shareholders accept it because the external validation works exactly the way management intends it to. (There's also cases where using independent consultants as part of some process is a compliance checkbox thing, and in those cases they are used for that specific reason.)
I'm the unreasonable one?
You’re debating against things people have directly experienced for themselves. You asked:
> Isn’t it just much simpler to accept that they indeed provide value in making good judgements?
It is not simpler to accept that when you have seen with your own two eyes multiple cases where they definitely were not making good judgements.
Naked Capitalism had a good take on the impact of AI on McKinsey:
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2025/08/wall-street-journal-...