It's still a hierarchical organization that needs to function to achieve its objectives.
Irrelevant. The problem is not a "legal" one. The problem is that Burnham is a fucking ticking timebomb who constantly explodes and just leaves complete devastation in her path. It was true in her own century and it remains true in the future. It's bad writing that the consequences of her actions are never addressed.It's a lawless universe
Star Trek is choke full of stories of Starfleet officers disobeying orders for moral or practical reasons. Kirk did it twice a week, Picard did it once every 3 episodes, Sisko was mostly left to do whatever the fuck he thought was the right thing to do. But the common thread in all those cases was that they never did it for personal reasons. They would raise moral, ethical and practical objections, being the people on the "front lines" and having perspective that people up the chain of command would often lack due to the distances involved. They would ultimately always put the greater good before their personal interests.
Burnham is the polar opposite. She has no guiding core of principles. She just rampages through shit, does whatever she feels like and the writers come up with absolutely terrible plot contrivances to justify her constantly failing upwards. That's why it's bad writing.
Burnham doesn't have a core personality beyond "I do whatever I feel like, no matter what", so it's impossible to write actual challenges for her.
With Picard, Kirk, Sisko, Archer, Janeway they clearly established who these people were and what guided their decisions. Then they would create moral dilemmas that the characters had to negotiate. If they had to sacrifice their principles for practical reasons we would see and understand the struggle and we would see how they would negotiate with finding ways to deal with these issues. And when they would sacrifice the practical for the moral principles we could understand why they would make these decision.
Burnham does none of those things. Again, it's not the character's fault. It's the fucking terrible writing by people who clearly don't understand how to write characters that have any depth or how to write a fucking story arc.
And this extends to entire show. It's just an inconsistent mess. They can't write episodic content and they can't write a story arc, they also can't seem to write dialogue that doesn't involve shouting.
Burnham's methods work because the writers magically make them work and just ignore every paper bag they write themselves into. And the admiral is an idiot because the writes are idiots and the admiral is just another one dimensional character who only exists to validate Burnham.out there and Burham's methods are adequate for the universe they are now in cause they deliver results. The admiral says that.
You can say whatever the fuck you want, it's still a fucking terrible show that is horribly written. You can choose to ignore that and say YOU like it for the entertainment value no matter what, and that's fine, but it's still really badly written, it's the same trash SYFY churns out on something like a 10000$ weekly budget.
Jesus, they should have just poached the writers from Killjoys or Dark Matter from SYFY and they would have ended up with a 15 times better show, because those people understood things like character development and how to set up story arcs. Even if SYFY cancels 9 out of 10 shows before those story arcs can be fully developed.
Fucking Dark Matter was cancelled halfway through its story arc and the writers still managed to cobble something together that at least made sense for ending the season.