Humans think this way. This isn't a cultural thing, it's human nature. We like positive people and dislike negative people. Ignoring the fact that political capital is a thing won't make it go away.
The goal is not to ignore human nature, but to build better tools for orgs to get feedback and act on it before it corrodes them on the inside. Government is the biggest of them all - fix this and maybe you can create government that works for you, instead of blowing taxpayer dollars like a leaky bucket. Humans in an organizations are like cells or organs in a body. Every country, team, and organization iterates on a proper nervous system for their body.
imo it's a cultural thing specific to organizations which are raking in money, as many tech companies are. The less actual competitive pressure there is the more everyone is pressured to just shut up and take their cut. Whether it's more or less than it could be is less important than just not rocking the boat.
Whereas if real existential need is on the line then people are incentivized to give a shit about the outcome more.
Tech is so rich in general that the norm is to just shut up and enjoy your upple-middle-class existence instead of caring about the details. After all, if this company blows up, there's another one way that will take most of you.
Not that this excludes the same behavior in industries that are less lucrative. There's cultural inertia to contend with, plus loads of other effects. But I have noticed that this attitude seems to spontaneously arise whenever a place is sufficiently cushy.
Also, this take doesn't (on its own) recommend one strategy or the other. Maybe it makes the most sense to go along with things or fight them for personal reasons, uncorrelated to the economic ones. But it's good, I think, to recognize that the impulse is somewhat biased by the risk-reward calculation of a rich workplace. Basically it is essentially coupled to a sort of privilege.
