The "investigate options" one was one of the few situations that I could see a possible slight. I've seen managers who play this dumb game where they put people on a research problem, and the job isn't for the engineer to do unbiased research & prototyping, but it's instead to reinforce whatever argument they were originally pushing for (but your "job" is to actually bring facts in). I've heard the "you're biased" line enough from those kinds of people to just shrug it off and move on, but I've also seen engineers who become paralyzed trying to figure out "what the boss really wants". For my biased point of view, these managers fit into a category called "the worst" anyways, so getting worked up about it is probably not worth it.

As an aside on the not understanding front, what was the deal with the team lead scenario? In my experience team leads aren't managerial positions so I don't quite understand why the guy was so concerned with other employees salaries. There was also a lot of missing details there, the author could have been making significantly more, and so the raises were treated differently? That was definitely a peculiar one.