That sounds like a layer of insanity that would make me consider jobs elsewhere. It sounds entirely unnecessary and burdensome , but was it unnecessary?
It was unnecessary because he was being too clever & having a good time, versus ever having delivered real production systems in our industry.
It also put devs on a dead end path which they realized pretty quickly.
Do you want to work for years on this team becoming experts in jinja to yaml to in-house DSL you'll never use anywhere else? Or do you want to write some python? If you can't get "promoted" into the team writing the core python engine, then you are obviously a second rate.. why stay?
Less technical management hires a hero who tells them everything they want to hear!
"I'm going to deliver the superapp, everything will be super centralized & tidy.. small dev team, then all the specific implementations will be grunt work by cheap devs!"
Throw in some buzzwords and they are sold.
Same audience that always signs the checks for no code/low code stuff no one actually wants.
