I've told this example before, but my close friend and roommate did a year at Twitter in 2019. He was tasked with implementing versions of simple, relaxing JS games like Tetris which would be used by Twitter's moderation staff when they felt they had accumulated too much stress and needed a break. He was making $300k USD to copy an open-source version of Tetris to be played by paid staff! This was actually one of his more engaging projects, most days he said that he wrote 0 code at all. He got great reviews and was being encouraged by his manager to pursue the senior track; from what I could observe from the outside, there was a complete misalignment of goals at pretty much all levels.

Perhaps we disagree which is totally fine, but I think this type of allocation of eng resources absolutely counts as "bloat". You may see that work as comparable to a seatbelt or crumple zone, but I personally see it as more comparable to all the other expensive, useless nonsense which plagues modern cars.

Now overall I wouldn't say this is unusual in tech. I know plenty of people at other major tech companies, including other FAANGs, that say the exact same thing. But just because its appears to be a industry wide issue does not make it okay. It seems to me like that this would signify bloat. You only have enough work for your developers to be working half time.

We aren't even getting into the whole rest and vest. That has been discussed here many times: https://www.google.com/search?q=rest+and+vesters+paid+for+no...