You don’t bring in a consultant to help you maintain the status quo, but to help you drive change.
I don't know what industries or companies this person has worked for as a consultant, but the ones I've worked for have absolutely used consultants to maintain the status quo. They bring in consultants because the full-time employees got reassigned to whatever new shiny project the senior managers have their eye on this week, but, in the meantime all this old legacy cruft still has to be maintained. Hence, consultants.
That's a different model. That's generally called staff augmentation, whereas generally the bigger consulting firms get pulled in to help the business deliver on the AI agenda (or whatever McKinsey's selling to clueless execs this year).
In my experience, it's also common that those big consultancies get those impossible projects because none of the internal teams what to work on them. And when they inevitably fail, they'll convince senior management to pivot to something more feasible.
I don't know what industries or companies this person has worked for as a consultant, but the ones I've worked for have absolutely used consultants to maintain the status quo. They bring in consultants because the full-time employees got reassigned to whatever new shiny project the senior managers have their eye on this week, but, in the meantime all this old legacy cruft still has to be maintained. Hence, consultants.