Could be a Chesterton’s Fence scenario
Instead of bemoaning efficiency, it’d be interesting to reward/value redundancy and antifragility, at least at the system level.
I think this could mean trust busting, regulation, and general cultural shifts.
There was zero redundancy versus leaving the directory open so they could open the next file (or using the application's "Open File" dialog).
That is a perfect example of wasteful motion (in their case due to a poor mental model of how computers worked, as I learned through later discussions) that could be simplified significantly without loss of quality or redundancy in the system.
Contrast this with: The surgical office called me this morning and stated, "The surgery is for a ganglion cyst on your left wrist." Which I confirmed. When I go in on Tuesday for the surgery this will be repeated, and a mark will be made on the area to be cut open (though in this case it'd be really hard to screw up and open the right wrist, as there is no, quite visible, cyst there). That is useful redundancy of the sort you describe. Removing any step (the initial visit a week ago, the call today, the check when I arrive, the mark on the wrist) and you increase the risk of error.
Punch line - Sausages coming from a new modern factory didn't taste the same. The new, more efficient building removed a long transportation step where the partially finished sausages picked up flavors and scents coming from different parts of the factory. They had to create a new process to manually add those flavors that they were accidentally getting for free from the old factory layout.
It would be good to have proof of a Chesteron's Fence analysis to say "yes, we know that Y & Z purposes and have analized the cost/benefit to removing them and the populations/systems impacted" - would this be an impact analysis?
In other scenarios, the process fails if any of the steps fail. In that case, redundancy is less stable, and you can improve both stability and efficiency by eliminating unnecessary steps.
In either case, there may be other considerations involved as well (flexibility, visibility, recoverability...) but sometimes we just didn't see a better way to do something.
This type of example exists in all industries. For example, finding a new alloy that has strictly superior properties across all dimensions for a specific use case. Or upgrading mail delivery routes using better pathfinding algorithms. Etc.
Hopefully not nitpicking too much: it's a win without _many_ tradeoffs. E.g., in the usual places where you'd accidentally get an O(n^2) operation rather than O(n log(n)), the O(n^2) operation is constant-space. In a sufficiently anomalous computing environment with a low enough priority on fast results you might still consciously opt for the O(n^2) solution.