I've seen some of those failures but made a different conclusion: None of those teams had the balls to say 'no' any time management got even a little bit upset about anything.

Now, part of that is on the engineers, but the only solution I know of is solidarity. But a lot of it came from systematic abuse from the project managers, wearing them down and then calling them incompetent when they couldn't deliver.

Just like this article says farther down, everybody is good at something. I've only had to talk about firing a handful of people (rather than reassigning) and it was always because they were belligerent to progress, or because of Dunning-Kruger Effect - they would not admit they weren't good at something and keep creating 2x as much work for everybody else who has to clean up after them.

Punishing people because they aren't good at everything is just some sadistic bullshit that makes small men feel important, and a lot of those are attracted to middle management. It's twisted and wrong and only rarely does a company succeed with that kind of corporate culture. And when they do there are always memoirs from the victims.