Compared to many companies where managers make a lot of decisions in a room with no feedback given to or received from engineers, it's heck of a lot better.
I'm not so sure this is better. I was an individual contributor for over ten years until I became a manager a couple of years ago, so I've seen both sides of this coin. My experience has been that typically engineers aren't interested in understanding all the non-technical things that are necessarily part of the decision making process, or worse think of these things as beneath them, asinine, or "easy". Much of the feedback from engineers is negative, not useful due to an overly narrow focus on specific tech stacks or solutions, or lacking context. Sometimes the context isn't there because of poor management decisions to not be transparent but often it's not there because the engineers' bias results in them not seeking it out. Very few things are black-and-white, and certainly it's better to include engineers' in the decision making process at some level, but that's a two way street--maybe engineers could work a little harder to overcome their own erroneous biases.
I'm not so sure this is better. I was an individual contributor for over ten years until I became a manager a couple of years ago, so I've seen both sides of this coin. My experience has been that typically engineers aren't interested in understanding all the non-technical things that are necessarily part of the decision making process, or worse think of these things as beneath them, asinine, or "easy". Much of the feedback from engineers is negative, not useful due to an overly narrow focus on specific tech stacks or solutions, or lacking context. Sometimes the context isn't there because of poor management decisions to not be transparent but often it's not there because the engineers' bias results in them not seeking it out. Very few things are black-and-white, and certainly it's better to include engineers' in the decision making process at some level, but that's a two way street--maybe engineers could work a little harder to overcome their own erroneous biases.