Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think this is more true than many would like to admit. Maybe 'most work' as meaningless isn't the way I would phrase it, but I know many including myself that are often creatively and technically challenged, work an average number of hours, but feel the mental stress of burnout purely because of the guilt and resentment of spending so much time on the specific job function, itself. To put it a little more abstract…
Interestingly, I've been thinking very much along these lines with regard to my present job. It occurs to me that the actual reason for my current role is to fleece the taxpayer of as much public funding as possible, and in about nine hours I'll be working a day just to fleece the city of property taxpayer's money. A quick bit of arithmetic reveals that we charge a significant amount ($50k+) for what we do, but put N…
For example many government and institutional project assignments are a complete waste of time and money to begin with.
Quite often they're a checkbox on some bureaucrat's desk.
Some perfect examples of this is you can find when looking at the (technical) tenders the European Commission issues. Pick your (tech) topic and be sure find a few million being thrown at some research projects that are never being utilised, or of which the outcome literally doesn't matter.
All being funded with taxpayer's money. There are hundreds of these projects being funded every year, and they are a complete waste of money.
While there are people dying on boats to get into the EU, they are funding machine learning and AI research projects that would be laughably outdated 3 years ago.
However, if one company doesn't pick it up, another one will. It is a whole ecosystem of its own of companies and organisations applying for useless EU projects.
Perhaps the problem is not the companies fulfilling these assignments but rather the governments that issue them in the first place. Or the general public that lets their taxpayers money get wasted like that in the first place.