> There will always be a point where there is a deadlock.
I've been on teams where this has never been the case. There are temporary deadlocks and disagreements, sure. But they always resolve via consensus somehow. Good leadership, horse trading, more investigation, experiments. Heck I even remember an incident where we resolved a disagreement with a coin flip. We realized we were bike shedding and just ended it.
The point is that if you resolve a deadlock but after the deadlock there is still somebody that is dissatisfied with the outcome, you don't have a well functioning team.
Anecdotes are always a terrible way to prove a point. I suspect that your examples are probably the kind that prove the rule. You may have been on teams where deadlocks didn't happen for your tenure. But did they happen before or after your tenure? A tech lead is like health insurance. It's not there for when you aren't sick. It's there for when you are. and it's usually too late to get it when you are already sick.
I've been on teams where this has never been the case. There are temporary deadlocks and disagreements, sure. But they always resolve via consensus somehow. Good leadership, horse trading, more investigation, experiments. Heck I even remember an incident where we resolved a disagreement with a coin flip. We realized we were bike shedding and just ended it.
The point is that if you resolve a deadlock but after the deadlock there is still somebody that is dissatisfied with the outcome, you don't have a well functioning team.