Was that kind of control well-received by your teams? Out of context, it sounds like it would be pretty rough to be an engineer on a team where your manager had sole control over what tools you could use - I suppose it might make sense for junior devs or a very small codebase, but I would caution against taking that stance in a team where you want to facilitate mutual trust

Provided the manager only rarely exercises the power, and is open to being persuaded not to, having somebody able to veto risky dependencies can be really quite useful.

Normally when I'm the one with that power we rapidly get to a general understanding of what's small enough that I (a) probably won't care (b) will take responsibility for tweaking the schedule to makre time to get rid of it if I do.

And 'big' dependencies are generally best discussed amongst the entire team until consensus is reached before introducing one anyway.

Well back then there were fewer options, but the result was that completed products were easy to work with. Perhaps we live in different times.