Hierarchy aside, I am surprised the literal author and maintainer of the project, on Google’s payroll no less, was not consulted on such a decision. Seems borderline arrogant.
The leadership of tensorflow (which was a political football) at the time was not particularly wise, or introspective, and certainly was not interested in hearing the opinions of the large number of talented junior and senior engineers. They were trying to thread the needle of growing a large external open source project while also satisfying the internal (very advanced) needs of researchers and product teams.
This was a common pattern at the time and it's part of the reason TF 2.0 became a debacle and jax was made as a side product that matured on its own before the directors got their hands on it.
Affecting leadership's decisions at Google became gradually more difficult over time. The L8s often were quite experienced in some area, but assumed their abilities generalized (for example, storage experts trying to design network distributed strategies for HPC).
Fortunately, with the exception of a few valuable datasets and some resources, effectively everything important about machine learning has been exported from Google into the literature and open source and it remains to be seen if google will ever recover from the exodus of the highly talented but mostly ignored junior and senior engineers who made it so productive in the past.
