People whose primary job is to "coordinate" often, either in a well-meaning attempt to be thorough or just to be relevant, try to pull as many different people into any decision-making as possible.

So instead of me just getting approval from my manager, I need to get approval/buy-in from departments A, B, and C.

In that case, firing the "coordinator" person increases velocity because parts of the business processes they prop disappear.

That's how I read it, too.

They pinpointed the problem of over-coordination to the messenger (coordinator) instead of the teams demanding final approval over launches (coordination).

Won't merging different teams under a single owner only push the problem further down the org chart?

There were too many meetings, so they got rid of the people whose jobs were to create lots of meetings.

The coordinators enable extra coordination that is not worth doing. The coordination itself is the problem.