Exactly this. Unless the new features directly drive new users or new revenue from existing users, for many products iterating 2x faster does not mean 2x ROI.

Additionally, from anecdotes here, at work, and in my network.. a lot of the unlocked developer velocity is going to fun/frivolous/extra things. I think part of it is developers have their own features they want for themselves that are the easiest and most direct thing to deploy LLMs against, in the absence of good direction.

Yes it's cool you finally achieved 100% test coverage, or you wrote a new utility that makes your job easier, or cleared the 2 year old ticket that was 100 deep in your backlog, etc. But there were ROI reasons these things were not done previously.

That's already putting aside the fact that development going 3x faster doesn't increase end to end output by 3x because <100% of a SWEs job is development.