That’s not because “QA had the final say”, it’s because your QA team were ass clowns. Any QA team that discourages dev from writing or running tests needs to be burnt to ground and rebuilt.
Devs that don't test their own code are usually wasting the QA team's time with garbage. It also tends to cultivate (or is a symptom of) an environment where groups are throwing projects over the wall, so to speak, without tightly integrating QA into the process. This wastes significant amounts of time.
Developers need to write tests so they understand how to structure the application in a manner that can be tested. The test engineer brings a fresh set of eyes and different expectations about how the application should work. That's valuable too.
Test code is just code. If you can write test code you can write production code. If you can write production code you can write tests.
If your concern is that devs don't have the right mindset for testing, you can have them collaborate with a QA specialist to define the test cases and review the test implementation.
