I often find that the people deriding the "gatekeepers" have never been gatekeepers themselves. Obviously, every developer should do whatever the hell they find most productive, because developers are known to have such incredible foresight, they never just pick tools they feel like using for no good reason, and they always consider the grand-scale effect of their decisions on the organization as a whole.

I have a feeling that the "grand-scale effect" you speak of is overrated. Any sufficiently big organization will be fragmented into groups that hardly talk to each other. At that point, if you want code that's usable by several groups, you must publish it as if it were Open Source (and have it compete with actual Open Source code). That is so much effort that most simply won't do it. It may not be even worth the trouble since the different groups are probably working on different software anyway.

While it makes sense to follow some unified standard as a team, it makes much less sense across teams. With few exceptions, there is no "grand scale".

I am soo going to use that argument.