It is usually the executive producer who is the ultimate decision-maker on the team. She delegates decision-making to the creative, technical, and art directors within their fields, but she will arbitrate when one discipline gets into conflict with another. Everyone always has feedback all the way down the line. What matters is keeping the big picture in mind and hiring/promoting team members who can be trusted to make decisions at their experience and understanding level.

I've worked on a team where the executive producer wasn't willing to push back against creative. The creative director was given carte blanche to push for whatever work was desired, resulting in the rest of the team building many different systems to a partially-complete state and then discarding them when we got new marching orders. It was awful for morale because most of the team felt like our work was pointless - we'd spend a week building the current idea from our creative director, then trash it the next week when we'd get a new idea and start over again.

The reason I mentioned "design by committee" is because designing by committee is about getting approval from all of the committee members. When that happens, humanity's natural affinity for loss aversion kicks in repeatedly - we're often afraid of making mistakes, so we tend to prefer "safer" options. When any major direction decision requires buy-in from multiple people like that, it naturally selects for safer and safer options. Making primarily "safe" choices results in an overall game that is safe but not extraordinary or special in any way, since extraordinary/special things require taking risks.

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