For sure. One way I'll talk about this is, "The biggest fantasy novels I've read are project plans." Everybody coalesces around a vision quite detached from reality and then just kind of lives in it for years. It's a weird sort of collective arrogance/faith.
There are alternatives, though! In Rother's "Toyota Kata", he describes a Toyota practice where they pick some far-off goal (which I think is called a "target condition"). That can be something that nobody knows how to do. Then they take one step in that direction and reassess. Over time the path might be somewhat wandering as they learn what works and what doesn't. Or they might revise the goal based on new knowledge. But they keep going, step by step.
That's a lot like short-cycle iterative software processes. Which I know work, because I've used them for many projects. But even software, which is infinitely soft, often gets the same sort of fantasy-driven planning.
I think you're right that the ultimate problem is how authority behaves, and at least in the US there's a terrible managerial culture that this is embedded in. My solution has been to find small pockets of sanity, but I've not figured out how to scale that up. But you might find some hope in this Mary Poppendieck talk, where she explains that it hasn't always been this way: https://www.infoq.com/presentations/tyranny-of-plan/
