Nonsense. I pair all the time with stakeholders. If you strip out all of the cucumber nonsense this is essentially what BDD is - fleshing out and refining specs by guiding people through concrete, written example scenarios.

I also often pair with infrastructure people on solving a problem - e.g. "im trying to do x as per the docs, but if you look at my screen i get an 1003 error code any idea what went wrong?".

Or, people on a different team whose microservice talks to mine when debugging an issue or fleshing out an API spec.

It's true that this isnt possible in plenty of organizations due to the culture, but lots of organizations are broken in all sorts of ways that set piles of cash on fire. This one isnt unique.