That’s a false dichotomy. It’s likely that that are both not idiots and what they are doing isn’t necessary.
When large companies have such excess engineering power to blow, they tend to say yes to all requirements and scope creep takes over everything. So no, the engineers building the abstract framework factory are not stupid, but they should have just built the report dashboard instead of the tool to generate tool generators.
As soon as an organisation gets above a size limit, organisational politics becomes the most important factor in any decision.
The decision to agree to a feature request starts to consider Who the feature request came from before any of the practicalities of the feature itself.
They're not idiots, and they are doing what is necessary, but the goals have moved from outward-facing market and customer concerns to inward-facing organisational-political concerns.
Every coder in a large organisation, sooner or later, gets given a task that makes no engineering sense but achieves some internal political goal.
When large companies have such excess engineering power to blow, they tend to say yes to all requirements and scope creep takes over everything. So no, the engineers building the abstract framework factory are not stupid, but they should have just built the report dashboard instead of the tool to generate tool generators.