I don't mean to pick on your example too much. However, when I worked in financial audit, reviewing journal entries spit out from SAP was mind numbingly boring. I loved doing double-entry bookkeeping in my college courses. Modern public accounting is much, much more boring and worse work than it was before. Balancing entries is enjoyable to me. Interacting with the terrible software tools is horrific.

I guess people that would have done accounting are doing other, hopefully more interesting jobs in the sense that absolute numbers of US accountants is on a large decline due to the low pay and the highly boring work. I myself am certainly one of them as a software engineer career switcher. But the actual work for a modern accountant has not been improved in terms of interesting tasks to do. It's also become the email + meetings + spreadsheet that you mentioned because there wasn't much else for it to evolve into.