From his complaints, I can deduce one of two things:
1. Carmack isn't a good leader. It takes a lot of "soft skills" to lead a large organization, and while Carmack has proven to be an unpaired engineer throughout his career, I haven't seen him build outstanding engineering organizations.
and/or
2. Carmack was fighting for influence with others at Meta VR, and couldn't get his goals take priority over others (Zuckerberg comes to mind).
I wasn't in reality labs, but all the posts from carmack over the years that I could see really really pointed at him experiencing both problems. Not only that, but people publicly both agreeing with his concerns, but also questioning why he was complaining about it instead of navigating the FB politics to lead the change.
1. Carmack isn't a good leader. It takes a lot of "soft skills" to lead a large organization, and while Carmack has proven to be an unpaired engineer throughout his career, I haven't seen him build outstanding engineering organizations.
and/or
2. Carmack was fighting for influence with others at Meta VR, and couldn't get his goals take priority over others (Zuckerberg comes to mind).