Or, what happens sometimes, a "team lead or someone" was replaced with a pack of freshly appointed team leads, with nobody being positioned to "break ties" with them and with an explicit ban on any sane engineering guidance "because we don't want to depend on one person".
Then those team leads would try to drive their teams and efforts in alignment with the ways they saw familiar or acceptable, and with zero interest for the "big picture" - they would be focused on the survival of their position and their team only. Fiefdoms would emerge, and every little such fiefdom would be pulling the rug its way. With disastrous consequences for all of security, end user convenience, stability, resilience and malleability of the system.
The zero interest in big picture and fiefdoms hits home pretty hard. Even if a subgroup wants to put emphasis on the big picture that's just one more set of hands on the rug. Suddenly you're spending more time arguing and fighting political battles instead of building great stuff. You can win some battles, but you have to have amazing persistence to not burn out or retreat to your subgroup mentality after a while.
I really don't care if I disagree with top level technical leadership. Having no technical leadership is even worse.
Then those team leads would try to drive their teams and efforts in alignment with the ways they saw familiar or acceptable, and with zero interest for the "big picture" - they would be focused on the survival of their position and their team only. Fiefdoms would emerge, and every little such fiefdom would be pulling the rug its way. With disastrous consequences for all of security, end user convenience, stability, resilience and malleability of the system.