Who says the engineers have any leverage they can push with? I sure didn't, when I worked there.

Not listening to engineers is a serious engineering problem that's played out in construction, automotive and software engineering dozens of times over.

The penalty for Microsoft ignoring their devs might just be a slow decline into irrelevance, not a bridge collapsing, or an autonomous vehicle hitting the lane barrier because the boss refuses to use LiDAR, but it's all bad management causing an engineering problem.