I had similar bad manager experience at $FAANG. Managers have so much control over information, narratives, and access to decision makers they control perception so most organizations are useless at properly evaluating their work.
I've seen managers ride out perpetually failing projects that haven't made meaningful progress in years, team 'decisions' that are reliably and demonstrably bad, services that cost a fortune to run and have a slew of problems and unhappy customers, and rock-bottom scores in anonymous surveys. None of this matters. Essentially your job as a manager is to take credit, dodge accountability, and expand your empire(headcount) as to maneuver yourself towards the better high-visibility projects. Just like politicians, unless they're overtly bad(and even then) it's difficult to separate them from the sprawling cybernetic organism so you just kind of shrug. Maybe a team's success is because of the manager, maybe it is in spite of them or vice versa - no way to know.
I've seen managers ride out perpetually failing projects that haven't made meaningful progress in years, team 'decisions' that are reliably and demonstrably bad, services that cost a fortune to run and have a slew of problems and unhappy customers, and rock-bottom scores in anonymous surveys. None of this matters. Essentially your job as a manager is to take credit, dodge accountability, and expand your empire(headcount) as to maneuver yourself towards the better high-visibility projects. Just like politicians, unless they're overtly bad(and even then) it's difficult to separate them from the sprawling cybernetic organism so you just kind of shrug. Maybe a team's success is because of the manager, maybe it is in spite of them or vice versa - no way to know.