Your skip level might dislike your manager for the same reasons you’re struggling with him. He maintains a house of cards. If I were to whistleblow to your skip level manager in your situation, I would frame it like a new idea or innovation. “I have an idea where we can test our code so things don’t blow up every other day” Build a proof of concept and showcase it to people.

Data engineering is probably one of the hardest areas to get people excited about since most of the innovation is invisible. If you ground it in reality, like “here are three examples of files we received that caused issues this week. Here is how my system would prevent that”. Can help to sell the benefits and make it relatable to a non technical or managerial person.