The point is to manage potential external liabilities. A business doesn't want any sort of liability they have automatically costing them if they can avoid it. They're more than happy to have anything that profits them automatically generate revenue, but if something could potentially lose them thousands or millions, they want to make sure there's a human-in-the-loop from management to check off. Not meeting SLAs or service outages are a good way to cost them money.
Few companies really respect their engineering teams/divisions in any sensible form from my experience, though I'm biased (even in heavy R&D environments). You're simply a means to an ends.
I understand your point though (and identify with it), but I find any mechanism/option that provides a way of containing potentially damaging information is going to be pushed by management over the option to release damaging information that a responsible engineer may want to disclose.
You're in a culture where admitting fault or liability is like pulling teeth and ripping finger nails off. It shouldn't be IMHO (we should own up to our mistakes and be reasonably forgiven), but that's unfortunately not the culture we have.
