Yep, it is definitely an engineer behind this, wanting to show off.
My job now is to deal with the aftermath of failed design choices at my company.
It only took a couple of guys to impose their deluded design, because noone stood up to call their bullshit.
We make embedded devices, the higher end are running linux.
But, they developped the linux devices as it was a desktop computer, the biggest latency hogs we have are multiprocess architecture over dbus, and event based UI which fetches live data.
The result is a slow and hanging UX, which gets slower after each update, and is irritating customers.
The lower end devices we sell are bare metal, and they are liked by our customers due to their swiftness. They just have a different architecture that focuses on end result (monolith, and a cache of data to display).
Scroll up. I've seen an overview mentioned about. The gist is: the architecture was good for the company and its revenue aspirations. The benefits to the customer a distant second.
It wasn't so much what but why. The constraints of why led to risky anti-customer product decisions. Decisions the CEO had no choice but to own.