Those in power seizing control of a product once it’s created is a timeless story. See the Prague clock tower or Daedalus the Labyrinth builder who was imprisoned there by King Minos. Not a new story, or a particularly wise business decision.

I'm not an engineer, but...Twitter doesn't seem to be doing all that well.

I don’t have much experience (4 years as a full time dev; FAANG and some medium sized startups) but honestly this is the truth. Some of the projects at these companies are so over bloated and redundant that if a company wanted to save money, they can easily fire a lot of folks, keep the necessary teams for the money making products and go into maintenance mode to keep the existing cash cows going

That might be so, but are those engineers being worked into the ground to make it happen?