Yes; one should not be too hard-line about hardware choice.
For a company, the choice of hardware is a critical job. These days, almost nothing is multiple-sourced (except resistors, capacitors and trivial analog chips
) so you have to think long-term. In the old days, Z80 etc, you often ran right on the edge of what the hardware could do. I did consultancy for years and often used an FPGA (Xilinx 3k/4k) to make it possible. Today, an ARM 32F4 is probably 10x-100x fast enough for most jobs, and 1000x fast enough for the "Z80 jobs" especially if floats are involved. But at £5 each (500-off, 32F417, just placed the order) there is no point is going for less power unless it is something cheap (which will usually be massive volume then i.e. a lot of custom silicon).
Also the customer may well have an EMC-qualified product which they don't want to totally re-do following lab tests.
So the customer may well specify much of the BOM, like CPU, ETH chip, 3.3V LDO regulators, ADCs, DACs, and such like, for you to use.
But this goes both ways, because a consultant familiar with the chip will do a much better job (within a given budget) than one who isn't. The customer should simply not employ someone who needs to learn this. As an example, I am working on a project on which another programmer spent a number of man-months sorting out bugs in ST drivers. That kind of thing (having a solidly debugged hardware+software platform) will make that consultant worth 10x more.
I think a company needs enough expertise to make hardware (and basic software architecture) decisions and then
needs to find a consultant/contractor who is already familiar with that stuff.
I have known plenty of cases where somebody had a product which they had demand for but could not make anymore because it was full of weird chips, which nobody would use in their own business
One example was a box containing a transputer (yes the Inmos chip:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transputer) and for no reason; it was obviously doable with a 4MHz Z80 which pre-dated the transputer by maybe 10 years! The contract designer just loved this chip and this was an excuse to play with it. The company ended up buying up museum samples on Ebay. After many years they threw money at it and got it redesigned.
If you let the contractor choose hardware at this level, you tend to end up with - at best - a different chip for every product and in most cases with negligible overlap in the BOMs which will make your stock levels much bigger than needed. Even stocking a 1k 0805 and 1k 0603 is a PITA because if you extend that across the board you end up stocking 2x more passives. Or 1k 0603 and 1.1k 0603 where the 1.1k is
probably pointless.