Middle management is lacking in true leadership, consistently looking for others to tell them what to do. There are only a very small handful in IT that actually have decision making authority.
Culture is very much like a ‘brogrammer’ frat house. The long term leaders have full authority without any accountability. There are very few actual effective leaders and the rest tend to be very threatened by others that are competent and effective. As a result they ‘rule’ by fear and just expect people to get in line - no real thinking is encouraged.
The term that is used is ‘gravity’ - things just are what they are.