I don't think this has to be true. I've worked in many places (granted, smallish teams of less than 20 or so) where tech decisions were made collectively, witho

I don't think this has to be true. I've worked in many places (granted, smallish teams of less than 20 or so) where tech decisions were made collectively, without even that much input from the CTO. Choosing boring technology doesn't have to be a top down thing, although it probably needs to have some mechanism for aligning a whole team (since 10 different "boring technologies" are no longer boring and bring along all the problems of using shiny new toys).