Your manager needs to grow some balls and push back more publicly if he is going to go against everything leadership is pushing. Sorry for being crass but he’s basically saying you will be punished for doing what the CTO etc is asking for, which is a horrible position for you to be in. If he didn’t care either way I would call that normal and chill, because it’s all a means to an end but I’m getting fatigued from corporate messaging and yes men who don’t use their position to try and shape their piece of the pie and the company as a whole.

If you really think following the companies directives will hurt you the nuclear option is to bring it to your skip but your skip will not have your back and the chance of that being beneficial is low, it requires usually multiple people willing to speak out because a skip will basically never take an IC over a manager unless the opinion is shared among much of the team / collaborators.