For sure! Another comment noted that this might be a sign of a dysfunctional organization, and I think there's a lot of truth there -- where systems have grown to such complexity that people involved in a larger project can't keep the whole thing in their head, and you get groups of people sort of faking it, assuming other people can fill in the details, and not wanting to appear ignorant about areas outside of your expertise.

I've been in other organizations (and even within this one) where my stupid questions revealed nothing new except that I had to go back and do some studying before I could usefully contribute.

I remember when I took a course in General Relativity as an undergraduate; I was much more math/CS focused than most people in the class, who were mostly physics people. And we would get together in study groups, and although I was respected for my general intelligence, it became clear that the questions I was asking were simply not the right ones -- that a physical/geometric intuition was something I did not have. In other words, I was actually the stupid one.

Much later I took a course in differential geometry, and eventually started seeing how it made sense mathematically, but I could never really connect it back to physical intuition. I think the problem that broke me was talking about the behavior of a point mass, and I had literally no idea how to attack that with the tools we had.