People think management sucks at hiring good talent (which is sometimes true, but I have worked with some truly incredible people), but one of the most consistent and costly mistakes I’ve observed over my career has been management's poor ability to identify and fire nuisance employees.

I don’t mean people who “aren't rockstars” or people for whom some things take too long, or people who get things wrong occasionally (we all do).

I mean people who, like you describe, systemically undermine the rest of the team’s work.

I’ve been on teams where a single person managed to derail an entire team’s delivery for the better part of a year, despite the rest of the team screaming at management that this person was taking huge shortcuts, trying to undermine other people’s designs in bad faith, bypassing agreed-upon practices and rules and then lying about it, pushing stuff to production without understanding it, etc.

Management continued to deflect and defer until the team lead and another senior engineer ragequit over management’s inaction and we missed multiple deadlines at which point they started to realize we weren’t just making this up for fun.