[lmilcin]

I have worked in couple of places, mainly largest banks, as a contractor Java dev.

Your freedom is directly proportional to the trust your manager has in your good judgment. If you can build the trust and convince the manager (indirectly) that they don't need to handhold you and it's better to use their time to focus on other things you can be doing mostly the stuff you decide needs to be done.

From my experience, in case of FB moderators, these things happen because of some kind of corporate scarring. I guess somebody or a group of people seriously exploited their freedom and the management instead of trying to actually understand and solve the problem used shotgun/lazy management to just outright squash the problem along with every team member's freedom.