I think you give him too much credit. He is going to drive it around and if he likes it he will give his thumbs up.
The question is, does he not trust the team to push the green button if the key metrics look to be better than previously-agreed-upon thresholds? Are they so borderline that he needs to sign off on the release after some debate?
A proper review process includes at least engineering review, business review and release review. No matter how crusty and cynical people have become about the history of delays, the idea that Elon is just a just a low-function salesman with no interest/capability to evaluate, seems absurd to me.
It's certainly true that there would and should be prior internal reviews within the team and with operational managers, Yet lt's pretty clear that Elon is close enough to this (very key) development activity that he would be involved in further review of something like v11 deployment.
The need for verification, validation and release review does not imply distrust of the development team; rather it implies a healthy process that gives team members, at many levels, a chance to step outside of their pressurized and potentially narrowly focused roles, organize their summaries and explain to a number of key people - including Elon.
I've seen good and bad review processes. The good ones reinforce healthy communication, reexamination from first principles, and bring new eyes to the problem. The bad ones evolve into a long checklist to avoid embarrassing repetition of past problems, without thinking holistically about why they really occurred. I will say that the more important reviews occur much earlier, when there's still time to affect the direction of the development. However, I see it as reassuring and not odd, that Elon would be involved at critical junctures.
Any commentary like this, that gives some credit to Elon and his process, will no doubt draw out the laugh emojis. It's fun to make cracks about his timelines and unreasonable optimism; I do it myself all the time. But all the same, I get a lot of enjoyment out of watching his very unusual companies from afar. You can't really explain how things work in inside by relying on car-salesman caricatures or the echo chamber of bitter internet rants from impatient customers.
