It seems to me that management is taught that a dependence on expensive experts, is a problem to be optimized. They want to manage the development process in a way that allows them to easily swap out one developer or team for another, or to ramp up production simply by increasing the number of developers assigned to a task.

It is almost as if they see the success that we have had in dev/ops with the "cattle, not pets" philosophy, and want to apply that in their own field. Making the subject behave consistently and predictably, whether it is a machine or a human professional, would be a prerequisite for that.