And just like DEI teams, ethics teams will be easy to cut back on if a company runs into economic trouble.

It’s like having a security team.

Security team to Joe Blow tech: Hey, you shouldn’t do that.
Joe Blow’s Manager: Hey Joe Blow, deploy that asap.
Joe Blow deploys.

Of course, it makes perfect sense… they want the good publicity of saying they have ethics oversight, but don’t actually give them authority because it would prevent them from doing what they want to do (and know might be unethical)

This makes perfect sense and should be expected. Many business models are incompatible with ethics (see Meta for an example). The business model defines their behavior. Having these teams is a PR exercise for such organizations.