Brooks’ book seems like it is percieved as a software engineering classic but it’s mostly about the management side of things.

Companies are very hierarchical so of course it makes sense for managers that most things should ideally come from one mind or a few agreeing minds. Then the average developer just have to do the grunt work.

So why is the book popular among developers? Because there is an elite cadre of developers in Brooks model which do have autonomy. I guess that cadre might also be known by other names.

[1] And the big man-month lesson of the book should be much more obvious now than it might have been back then: as you add more cooks you also have to take into account the communication overhead among all the new nodes.