The real problem here is the leadership deficit. The manager got pushback on the estimates, and instead of explaining the reasoning and bargaining on scope, he caved and kicked the can down the road by letting the estimates crumble. Yes, estimating is hard, and you are probably going to be wrong, but once you have your finger on the scale to get a desired result, you can't blame that on the difficulty of estimating. Just deplorable leadership.
At my current employer, managers love to use this term. We are asked not to gold plate.
And yet they’re the least qualified to decide what is gold plating.
Case in point, gold plating in my managers’ minds means: “code reviewing, refactoring, automating code quality (linting in pipeline etc), or writing any kind of test”. To the rest of us, this is far from gold plating, nice to have, or optional. Yet this is what gets cut every single time. And then we’re asked why we suck so much and “just fixing that one little button” takes a month and breaks five other things.