I think that the start of the article was interesting, then it goes down the path of middle managers being the root of all evil, just seems a bit like whiplash.

I completely agree with building the wrong thing is the root cause of a lot of failures. In fact, I think that AI has stopped a lot of the conversation of "Why should I not build this". Historically, that answer was ROI - why spend days/weeks/months on something that might not be valuable. Now I see people just saying "Yes, and" to all feature requests.