In a healthy org, leaders up and down the stack should have some conditions where they can say no.

Whenever there is a big power differential in a discussion, the person with the most power by default wins.

This can quickly mean that bad decisions get made because the local relevant context is only known by the significantly less powerful person.

Knowhow is difficult to transmit, which means someone with relevant intuition on why something is more costly than it looks might not be able to succinctly communicate it.

To the very powerful leader, it will look like the underling doesn't have a good reason, but actually it's just that the reason is hard to communicate.

This is one of the reasons that senior leaders shouldn't get involved in very small details.

Because when they do it will be very hard for the actual right answer to be decided due to the power differential.

And everything the very senior leader might look at has to be handled defensively, in case they do in the future.