To add to this, during Morrowind Todd was a junior software engineer who progressed to software engineer. He would not have been in a position to tell Kirkbride to do anything.
Isn't Todd credited as the Project Lead on Morrowind as well as Redguard? Either Todd climbed the ranks about as quickly as the player does in one of Bethesda's faction quests or you're mixing this up with his work on Daggerfall.
Well Todd clumb quick, but he was not that high up during Morrowind. Kirkbride, Doug, Mark and Ken all had superiority over him. He got assigned to finish up the Imperial legion, note he did not write it nor was he allowed to change much (per Doug, he was only allowed to add details but not change things as the quest line was almost ready.)
If you look at Morrowind, it has tons of "project leads" for a game that had like 30 Devs working on it. Pretty much everyone was made a project lead because people were doing 70h a week for a year and being jacks of all trades. However, Todd was low enough that Ken, MK and Doug did boss him around according to interviews.
Edit: I remembered wrong, he indeed was a project lead. But I remember distinctly there being an interview where I think Doug stated that Todd was an errand boy. This was the same interview MK got pulled by telling them to remove the interview or all his contributions from the imperial library because Doug was running amock and breaking his NDA there.
Edit 2: Todd was made a project lead when Bethesda was down to 6 employees. The company had at that point a team consisting mostly of leads.
""There were six of us at the time, right? The studio had gotten that small, and I was in charge of Morrowind, but by that time, once you get to that point, there was this element of no fear. What's the worst that's gonna happen? We could go out of business. Well, let's go all in. This is the game. Let's put all our chips on the table. This is the game people want from us, this is the game we wanna do."