Relying on VPs to do every front-line job in order to identify and fix problems would indicate that something is fundamentally broken at the company. That should never be the primary method by which a company identifies and fixes such problems.

As a former engineering manager, if someone on my team walked me through why getting PRs out to prod was an insane nightmare, I'd take note, work with them to gather evidence, and present it to my director and try to escalate it to the point where we could take action to improve it. If the VP is any good at their job, they'll listen and work with us to fix it.

That's about the time I'd expect for a new hire to ramp up on the codebase and submit a PR behind a feature flag and probably experiment that makes it to production. It takes a day to even set up the environment and be able to start looking at and running the code locally. Four days to read through a brand new codebase, identify the changes that are necessary, write a small tech spec (optional based on how small the change is), submit the PRs, get them reviewed and approved, and then merged sounds reasonable to someone who's never worked in the codebase before.