@carnage4life as a phd student (with teaching obligations, as is common in DE) I experienced a variant of this first hand. As the „decision makers“ were pissing themselves at the start of the pandemic, the people in admin et cetera suddenly had effectively carte blanche to just Do Shit and suddenly it was possible to get things approved in record speed, suddenly you could say „i have this idea for how we can make this exam for this class work given the restrictions“ and what you‘d hear back was „sounds good - we‘ll figure out how to make it legally solid“. For a brief moment in time, while the politicians and middle managers were so scared they‘d say something wrong that they simply said nothing, efficient bureaucracy that works for you was a reality.