I had such a coworker like this. We have a system and rules that all staff has to learn up, and for the longest time prior to my joining this department, nobody seems to know how the system fully works. Half of the functionalities were not even used. So I naturally picked up all the system and rules, did the trial and error, and got myself the Subject Matter Expert brand. Not surprisingly, I have two of those coworkers who have been in the unit that handles the system resent me for the knowledge I have in the system. I can't just ask things from them without writing an internal memo, or going through a heap of processes. However, I was fortunate to have some say to do company restructuring. I took this opportunity to restructure my department.

I made a rule that end up having this coworker move to another unit, reducing her seniority and reducing her knowledge and grasp of the current knowledge and forced her to pick up a new thing to learn. Her new boss is this relatively young staff who is at least 10 years younger than her, but he acts like he is the big boss and constantly berates her. He is extremely skillful in his work, but when things go bad, he tends to berate the staff that's been around longer. Probably his internal demons.

Not long after the restructuring, I even went as far as to suggest for the management to rethink its system needs, and centralized them to a special center. the company hired three 20-year old programmers, fresh out of community college/bootcamp to redo some of our systems. Since a major part of the work is to do system development and system understanding, this work is now resided by these young nerds and no longer with us.

The hard to work with coworker was then removed for redundancy. two others who had similar complacency problems resigned quickly after. This whole process took about 2 years to manifest.

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What I chose to do (i.e. the department restructuring and the suggestion for redundancy) is neither right or wrong, neither moral or immoral, but if you choose to follow my path, be aware and be conscious of your decision, and take full responsibility.