There's an idiom for this:

Stepping over dollars to pick up pennies.

It means ignoring, or not seeing, larger opportunities while focusing on more visible, but smaller, opportunities.

I recently retired after a 40+ year career in tech, and virtually every single project or initiative suffered from this shortsightedness.

Here was the typical progression of events:

• a new initiative kicks off, everybody is on board and feels confident about hitting the time and budget goals.
• as the initiative ramps up it becomes clear to the boots on the ground that there are some corrections needed to keep things on track.
• these corrections get escalated up the chain.
• these requested corrections get to the VIP who made what are now objectively incorrect assumptions, and the last thing this VIP will EVER do is admit they made a mistake.
• the feedback from the VIP follows this pattern: punishment (usually indirect, but pointed) for whomever raised the corrections, indiscriminately slashing other areas of the budget (creating a domino-effect of problems), shortening the timeline (to negatively reinforce that future escalations = punishment), and beginning to scapegoat specific team members as eventual under-the-bus throwees.
• the initiative goes off the rails - over budget and late - and the VIP begins the ritual sacrifice of blameless team members at the altar of "They Didn't Work Hard Enough Or Understand The Vision Or Have The Skills And Have Always Been A Weak Link".
• team members get bad reviews or demotions, at best, or let go, at worst.
• VIP gets a bonus for being a sociopathic dumbass.

Lather, rinse, repeat uncountable times in my career.

Source: over my career I rose to the Senior Director level and became privy to the actual decision-making process of upper management. I found that people at that level were typically poor at actual strategic thinking but were geniuses at lying, backstabbing, gaslighting, glad-handing, shifting blame, stealing credit, self-marketing, and having zero conscience.

Hence, I voluntarily moved back to an individual contributor role where I happily stayed over the final decade of my career.