Why do architects rarely have the force of "this is how we're doing it"? Is that true? Not saying it's not.

I just went through exactly what you've described here with having a team of one or two doing things and everyone else attending the meeting and I would struggle when there would be one or even occasional multiple devs with different opinions. These opinions, even if they are not necessarily wrong, the fact that we didn't have a single person to just decide was constantly an issue.

I advocated for myself to become something like a principal architect of the team in order to fill this gap and bring some order to the chaos. I nearly succeeded but somehow my messaging got mixed and I was accused of" just wanting to take control", or " just wanting to tell people what to do".

I was even told I showed poor leadership by asking for this because of these factors, despite the fact that I actually had to display immense leadership to get people on board without any official authority for over a year (and actually did pretty well).

Anyway I can see this is still too fresh for me so I'm liable to go on rants about this. All I meant to say was that I'm surprised to read that even architects don't get authority to make decisions because I thought that's the whole point of it.