You're basically just criticizing capitalism for being stupid and inefficient, and I 100% agree with you.

But are they? Generally in tech, it's really hard to gauge people's performance and most companies are conservative with firing people for performance reasons. So you could coast by on mediocre performance. You team won't be happy with you, but you probably will keep your job simply because you're given the benefit of doubt. Tech is one of those areas where someone can actually be 10x as effective as another person, because so much of the job can be spent on stuff like debugging and dealing with weird issues, where one person might spend all day on an issue that another person can resolve in minutes.

There's also something to be said about the fact that companies are usually paying for your time, not output. Contractors are the ones who are paid for output, not employees. It's also straight up expected in tech that you're looking for ways to automate some tasks so they don't have to be done anymore. It's not like some mindless office job where you're expected to do X reports per day. There's a never ending list of bugs to fix and features requested. You're generally paid to find ways to increase productivity, not merely do the same thing over and over.

At any rate, tech is usually also paid well enough for it. There's still massive income disparity between regular workers and C-suite, but at least the pay is always well, well above living wages, stock options are commonly given to regular workers, and high performers often are rewarded for doing better than average. IMO, tech jobs aren't really an area to focus on the kinda mindset you have, since it does so much better than most (not perfect, but still far better). Most jobs don't get anything close to what tech jobs offer to regular employees.