I'm more trying to be realistic, It's difficult to imagine how you would hire a lead anything and not give them any agency into what they are doing. That's the whole point of lead, to lead the others in the goal of whatever that thing is.

I think that you can be marginalised and restricted, but it's pretty unlikely this person, as a lead, had no agency about quest design

That also does not mean that they couldn't do something better elsewhere. Just that assuming that they were locked down by bethesda into writing boring one note quests seems… like a reach.