Frugality can mean being penny wise pound foolish. Not buying tools people need, building things when you could buy them, and settling for less. It's hard to evaluate people on frugality without it being about cheapness. I would argue buying top of the line monitors, software, computers and chairs for your engineers is the frugal choice with the best mid and long term value for your money, but will it look like that to others? Likewise I've seen cultures where the CTO had to approve buying a $50 replacement laptop charger - that's just a waste of time.
That said, leadership should be very deliberate in how money is spent. Taken too far, you can end up with a bunch of high cost low value tools. For example many times I've seen AWS bills where a few weeks of work means millions in savings per year, or tools that cost $10s of thousands per month but are only used by 1-2 people. And that adds up.