> The levels of legibility that companies actually aim for are much more defensible
Many companies run in such a way that there is no bucket for "engineers get to do stuff they know is important x% of the time." So what happens is that things that executives don't understand the significance of all get 0 time allocation. Other teams may be told they aren't allowed to work on something owned by the CI team (again often for legibility reasons).
This is how I work at a "startup" that has just a single test environment that everyone has to share after 10 years of existence.