I agree that the top-voted answer is obnoxious, and right off the bat: "Most of your question is really a rant about how things work at your workplace. Discuss

I agree that the top-voted answer is obnoxious, and right off the bat: "Most of your question is really a rant about how things work at your workplace. Discussions about toxic workplace practices per se are out of scope for PMSE." Not a friendly, charitable answer, and it is right at the top. As to the question itself, crowd-source the estimation, is the best approach, in my experience. Get the team together, each member write down an estimate, and reveal all the estimates at once. If there are outliers, have a discussion, otherwise round up and move on to the next estimation. If you're in a scrum shop, you can abstract the estimation by one level and call them "stories" and you're estimating "complication" not "time", which is even better.