It's not crappy management for engineers to have technically cool ideas that are bad business, and then rationalize their value. It's bad management to let them execute on them (except if you have some sort of do-what-you-want time for developers, which is a good way to compensate and balance for this).

On the other side of the coin, you have the semi-technical manager who has ideas that are unassailable, because they are able to make "do this that way or you're fired" decisions.

These kinds of managers are utterly toxic. At the slightest hint of this kind of behavior, I'd be reaching out to my contacts to find new employment, where I would certainly be paid better, but hopefully don't have a feudal work environment.