To be completely honest, is there an environment that can be classified as 'well managed' that does not exhibit these tendencies? This largely seems like core competencies of a good dev being manifested through a management body that needs to get some sort of credit. I feel like this is some sort of piece trying to grab credit with an engineering team as a PR move.

Building a quality product for the CLIENT (your users) seems to be the basic idea of most people and places I've worked with and for.