Culture at big tech companies

I'm a senior dev who joined a new company some months ago, and I'm finding my own team's dynamic is making it really difficult to get anything done.

We have a lead who spends hours lecturing us about code quality, often preventing and derailing any conversation I want to have about business requirements. He also has a complete aversion to doing any work. If there is even a 5% chance that we'll later have to change a part of something we're working on, then he just won't let us work on it at all.

His philosophy is that we can't risk writing any code that might have to be changed or refactored later, because that takes time, so let's spend hours having hypothetical debates about it instead, while we build nothing. We've spent so much time arguing about this project that we could have built it 6 times over already.

For example, we've just spent the last 2 days debating about how to name certain methods. But this was only after another 5 hour meeting about which library to use for some small piece of functionality, between two options that were 99% the same. At every other place I've worked, this would be unfathomable. Everything just gets blown out of proportion here.

I feel that at any moment, the business is going to start demanding some actual results, then we'll immediately transition to the other extreme – rush into building without any thought of quality or design. I just have no idea how anyone thinks this is sustainable.

It doesn't seem that I'm able to do my job as a senior dev here, because I can't write a single line of code, or instruct others to, without this lead going "Woah woah woah, hold up!". Each line of code then equates to, on average, about 10 hours of meetings.

I've spent most of my career working in smaller companies, so tell me, is this the norm in large places? Or have I just been unlucky with the team I'm placed in?