Comment by mpyne

An analogy that might make more sense is horizontal scalability vs. vertical scalability. A leader's ability to understand all the details of the proposal brought to them by the team inherently caps the organization's ability to scale up.

Offloading the detail onto the team allows the org to scale higher by allowing the leader to bring more teams/problems into the mix. But it also introduces the complexity of keeping those teams in close enough alignment that the overall effect is still positive.

This is by no means guaranteed to be positive, and there's a lot of details to get right for leadership in making this work. But they are different details than what each individual team was bringing to leadership.

Abstractions are helpful, in business management as much as in systems architecture.