> This is an easy mistake in large organizations. Any project often already has so many stakeholders and politics that they are incentivized to avoid adding more stakeholders to the project if they are politically capable of doing so.

This person is already a stakeholder, you don't have a choice to add or not add them, you have a choice to include or not include them. And it's a gamble to not include them for this exact reason.

I'm all for keeping stakeholder counts as low as possible but you can't do it by just pretending some of your stakeholders don't exist, that's no good and in my experience, usually ends exactly like this.