Having worked on projects using the "gating" method described, I have found that it only makes a bad situation worse.

Software development is not a nice sequential process and "gates" provide major stopping points for projects. Whatever momentum the project may have gathered grinds to a halt as people prepare the the review, schedule the review meeting, and respond to requests from people who, to date, have shown no interest in the project.

A risk analysis review is a similar waste of time. Often far more time is wasted in the review that is saved in the risk mitigation itself. The end result, more often than not, is that the keepers of the corporate procedural manuals reject the proposal anyway, leaving the task even further behind.

I can't predict whether the project manager would have kept his job if, instead of trying to bring the project in on time, he had instead schedule numerous reviews. Maybe he would have kept his job by creating a series of artifacts rather than actual code, but maybe the job would not have been worth keeping.

The success of a software project depends upon delivering software not upon delivering meeting minutes.