The ultimate power to make policy choices should be made by lawmakers who can be voted out. Bureaucrats are too insulated. An individual bureaucrat can't feasibly be fired by either a President or the Congress.
Yes that is literally what conservatives have always stood for since we developed the term "conservative" to stand for that kind of political stance. Back then it was to preserve the power of the French aristocracy over the rising calls for democracy. Today it's to preserve the power of the wealthy and over that of everyone that has to actually work for a living.
They use different tactics, deflections, and posturing to justify their positions, and are willing to give different kinds of concessions in order to achieve those goals today, but it's been essentially the same overarching theme for a couple hundred years. A well-functioning democracy (in this case, one where employees can organize to negotiate the terms of their employment) is an obstacle to them that they want to clear.
FWIW I think there's a difference here between the big-C Conservative politicians and judges who are hopelessly corrupt, vs the run-of-the-mill small-c conservative voters who keep voting for them because of virtue signals (guns, abortion, defense, anti-wokism, whatever). The corruption isn't really a high concern to them, either a positive or negative, as long as they get their values enshrined into political power.
It's not really SCOTUS vs the Executive, it's whatever pathway to power they have available at any given juncture in history. They're very good at pivoting and projecting! Not to say it's admirable, but it's undoubtedly very effective, having captured almost the entirety of the US power structure over the last decade while also striving to make sure their liberal opponents cannot easily reverse those gains. Having so thoroughly captured SCOTUS that they can rewrite/reinterpret the Constitution at will is just the latest move in a long series of such maneuvers over the past decades, skillfully executed.
Local is best. Send this kind of thing back to states where it belongs.