Witness how the web was once a funny little collection of nerds sharing stuff with each other. But once it got big enough that you could start making money off it, the important people showed up and started taking over. The web still has those odd little corners, but it's largely the domain of a small number of giant powerful corporations.
I don't think there is a silver bullet for dealing with egomaniacs who want infinite power. They seem to be a part of the human condition and dealing with them is part of the ticket price for having a society.
I often think a weakness of liberal, western society is the insistence on rationality, that like the hunter in question could just easily put their abilities and accomplishments alongside those of others and get a pretty accurate picture. This is super untrue; we need systems to guard against our frailties, but we can't admit we have them, so we keep falling into the same ditches.
Klein wrote a book a few years ago on the topic of polarization, human's inclination towards clan/tribal thinking, and how it manifests itself in (US) politics:
Even if people dislike scrum, find Git complicated and don’t want to open up JIRA - these tools are not the problem, these tools help building loads of working software.
We as software engineers with devops can deliver great and complex projects and build great systems. Lots of businesses people don’t even understand how much in control we can be of the environments and code.
Yet developers/IT is there to be blamed. Like we should be ashamed, Uncle Bob will give lectures “how developers should be more professional”.
Yet I always find business people who are like children in the corn field.
With small difference business/sales guys are pushy and walk over engineering guys and engineers bend over and take the blame and business guys can always say “those IT kids playing with toys instead of doing real job”.
Not (necessarily) wrong, but if you start small, Important People may not want to bother with something that is Unimportant and may leave things alone so something useful and working can get going. If you starting with an Important project then Important People will start circling it right away.