I think that is a really important way to frame this particular problem from a parenting perspective, CallMeJo.
We spent a lot of years/effort in emphasizing that just because you COULD manipulate people, allowing them free will and autonomy is-- well, it's just the morally right thing to do, even if you can see that they'd be better off if you... well, steered them just a teeeeeeeensy bit, you know, just for their own good.
This doesn't even get into the ethically unambiguous territory of being prone to doing it for one's own benefit (at the expense of others) or worst of all, for malicious entertainment. Luckily, neither of those has ever been a problem with our DD, but I could see that with a different child, wow-- scary, scary territory, that.
DD sometimes still struggles with this sense of passively "engineering" better outcomes for others, and she's nearing the end of her undergraduate years, so it's always a work in progress, I expect.
And yes, the executive function and asynchrony is one of the harder things about this particular set of parenting challenges. I'm going to be so glad once DD finally "catches up" to her adult self. It's been a long two decade waiting game, and the ground under us (and her) changes continuously, but there has never been and will never be any rule book.
We just have to remember that. She is an outlier. Nobody else is better equipped to deal with this, any more than we are. We know her pattern of asynchrony better than anyone else, and we parent the person that we have in front of us, and the future outcomes that we can see (and feel, at a gut level) are most likely with particular decision-making.
