This article touches on an extreme case "what if all your Sr. Engineers are financially independent?" but I think could do more to explore real world examples and address the elephant in the room, compensation through vested shares. I'm not personally experienced about that kind of thing, but I can imagine it helps maintain a healthier balance of power.

Certainly from a raw game theory kind of analysis, an engineer who can monopolize information and has gained authoritative understanding of the design can be crazy powerful, for better or for worse. If this agent optimizes for good salary, lowish effort and high stability... yes I can imagine a senior engineer who fits the name in rate of technical output, not only pecking order order.

I worked in a company like this.

The senior engineers, who built the main product that pays the bills have all been there for 25+ years. They held shares in the company back when it was worthless, and now they are all very wealthy. At this point, they literally show up to work just for fun and they aren’t shy about making this known.

The result is that the company has massive insurance policies on these guys in case they die. They also call the shots; they have outsized influence over a range of functions they know absolutely nothing about, ranging from HR to finance to security.