because thats their job description and not yours

What would it look like if you were a staff software engineer whose job description didn't include theoretical work, but whose output consisted almost entirely of theoretical work?

That's not an issue of losing political battles, that's an issue of you getting fired very rapidly.

This advice is entirely premised on the idea that you can choose to do theoretical work if you want to, but that it will be a bad idea.

The VP is likely to get political backing to do a “big change” and leverage resources to make it not theoretical.