Anecdotally, these were always situations when I wanted to pass someone but received weird resistance from other stakeholders and it ended up being a situation of stalemate. So, you could have faced similar things.
Job hunting is / often is pretty brutal / stressful so I try to avoid taking anything personally.
At a very large company, I was involved in hiring something like programmers for a particular niche department. Over years we developed a good set of battle-tested questions, and had a clear process for evaluating candidates.
But all of this feedback was just an input for management and HR. Regardless of how much we liked a candidate, only HR was trusted to communicate and negotiate with them.
We later found out that candidates were routinely ghosted if the company had chosen not to hire them. We raised a stink about this, but ain't nobody got time to fight that fight.
Anyway, the TLDR: especially with big organizations, never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence.