That’s not exactly what’s happening. It’s not about making coworkers’ lives more difficult. It’s about preferring pseudo-work that looks like progress (meetings, process, consensus-building, planning sessions, endless documents) instead of work that delivers results.
Once a project ships, everyone can see whether it was a success or failure. However, if you can keep it in the planning limbo for as long as possible you can avoid that moment of truth. Another round of meetings and refactoring and consensus building is safe because it’s easy to say you’ve followed the process and therefore produce good process-work. Shipping to customers is risky because then the product can actually fail.
In companies where someone’s reputation and promotion prospects depend on avoiding project failures, it becomes attractive (and safer) to deal more in the pseudo-work than the actual work.