Yes, this is nuts. It's performative micromanagement for the sake of maintaining status. If the end product is indistinguishable, and the user experience is in

Yes, this is nuts. It's performative micromanagement for the sake of maintaining status. If the end product is indistinguishable, and the user experience is inferior (because it takes so much longer, and customers are just sitting there, waiting, hungry...) literally the only difference is the assertion of management/owner status for the sake of it. That might have some marketing leverage for a restaurant, but "We write everything in machine code with a biro before hand-assembling it" isn't going to win any hearts and minds in software dev.