Some organizations like to formalize and structure things beyond the reasonable levels. In companies that create computer software, this is especially true in two areas: project management tools and build strategies on CI servers.
Excessive configuration of project management tools usually ends with issues processing workflows on JIRA (or any other management software) so becoming complicated that it will never fit a single wall when expressed as graphs, no matter how large this wall is. If your manager has such configuration mania, you can either talk to him or start looking for a new team. Unfortunately, this does not reliably ensure any improvement in that matter.
But when it comes to CI, we can do more. Continuous integration tools are usually maintained and configured by us: developers. These are OUR tools that are supposed to improve OUR work. If someone has an irresistible temptation to toggle every switch and turn every knob possible, then they should be kept away from the configuration of CI systems, especially if their main job is to talk the whole day and make decisions.
There is really no need for making complex strategies to decide which commit or branch should be tested. No need to limit testing to specific tags. No need to queue commits in order to perform larger builds. No need to disable building via custom commit messages. Your continuous integration process should be simple to reason about. Test everything! Test always! That's all! If there are not enough hardware resources to test every commit, then add more hardware. Remember that the programmer's time is more expensive than silicon.