I've seen plenty of the evils you're talking about, managers tend to make terrible engineering decisions and then instruct their engineers to go forth and make it so. I guess what I'm saying is that, as an engineer, your value proposition is that you can shield your manager from getting mired in such details by not asking for their unqualified opinion in the first place.

Just give estimates which include time for not doing things the dumb way, and then don't do things the dumb way. When it comes time to talk about performance reviews, call it "taking ownership."

Ah yes, agreed!