There is definitely some degree of executive decision their management could make but it would shred one of the two leads careers. This kind of hard call is why

There is definitely some degree of executive decision their management could make but it would shred one of the two leads careers. This kind of hard call is why you're boss, so it says something about someone when they don't make this call (although we don't know the full story here, this situation happens enough in general). The post I was replying to was asking why an individual lead engineer in this scenario would do this. They have reasons to fight and no reason to concede. Their bosses have every reason to, at minimum, get both sides to "hug it out" so why haven't they?