It takes a lot of patience to undo this damage and explain that simplicity is much more important than lazily, mindlessly repeating "best" practices. I am using quotes intentionally because they aren't actually best -- "best" would suggest there are no better practices which obviously cannot be true.

The goal should always be to make the application simple and easy to work with. Patterns should be tools to achieve the goal rather than being goals themselves.

Simple is important because it allows understanding your application (which is important for developer efficiency as well as improving reliability). It also enables you to modify your application much more easily (more code usually means more work to change it) and this is important to fighting technical debts and to reduce cost of any future development.

Easier to do that than just admit technical dept. Some people cannot acknowledge a problem and live alongside it if it is too large to tackle immediately. It has to be explained away or compartmentalized. How simple it is blame the messenger. Sorry you had to experience that from your team.

I feel like this is a rather unfair comment because it doesn't sound like a situation created by "clean architecture."

Granted, you probably should not try and force every detail into this architecture just like you should not rewrite a perfectly good library just because it does not fit into it nicely. But even then; drilling through half a dozen or more layers for every change sounds just wrong. There should not be just any kind of separation in your program. There should be a separation of concerns.

The real problem seems to me a culture in which "We do $X because of $AUTHORITY." is regarded as a sensible answer to criticism. I have worked with exceptionally confident, almost blinkered, people in charge of the big picture and never once have I heard a bullshit answer like that.

What you can sometimes do, is to remove all those layers to be able to implement or fix something. Then tell the team that you didn’t have time „to do it properly“ and you focused on functionality and efficiency over design. Management loves that.

And after it’s done, some of those abstraction nazis can refactor in all those abstractions again. So they don’t distract you from the next meaningful task.

But make sure, that you understand what benefit this decoupling brings. Because sometimes it’s useful, just not often enough.