You have to see this from the point of view of a middle-manager whose main concern is his own career and salary. First, it's much easier to manage junior than seniors, more so when you are not an engineer yourself. Also, it's more likely you get a better salary when managing a large team of junior than a small team of senior. Even better, you can become a manager of managers if there is a bunch of juniors to manage. Another problem is that an employee cannot earn more than his boss, and non-tech managers salaries cap at a certain point.
"Why is X already solved, except for maybe reason Y" is a HN staple comment though. A few months I came across "Other than nuclear weapons regulations, is there any reason this can't work to fix <blockchain project XYZ>?".
It's a problem that reliably recurs everywhere because organisations are made up of people and people are unwilling to be managers over other people who make more money than them. They quit. You need managers and if you want to keep them they need to make more than their direct reports.
Another way this is done is with reinforcement of social hierarchy outside of comp. This is where you get blatant infantilization of developers and in my experience wildly untrue stereotypes (repeated uncritically as true all over most organizations) about "normal" developers being incompetent at design, UX, requirements gathering, communication generally, understanding business trade-offs and concerns, et c. Nearly all non-junior devs I've known have been at least decent at most or all of those things, actually.
[EDIT] Oh, it's also why devs are compensated like professionals (they haven't been able to figure out how to stop that, yet) but work at open tables crammed together, under management's direct eye, like they're packing cocaine in Colombia or something.
Some things in life are like the laws of physics. You will simply never make more money than your manager, no matter how many economic productivity arguments you can make.
I do not believe a couple of Quora replies are substantial enough evidence to prove an industry wide trend. How do we know those people on Quora aren't prone to sampling bias?
I believe they are saying that senior engineers will know what to do and give pushback when an ignorant manager gets fixated on unnecessary goals. Juniors are easily told. The product will be worse for it.
In a good team trust and experience are essential parts of the formula.
