Here's one to add onto your list: pair/mob programming is bosses weaponizing employees against each other to "prevent goofing off".
I've started to form a belief[0] that large software projects in general are A Bad Idea. Whatever it is, if it requires more than a handful of people to build, it's probably for the greater good of everyone--the workers involved, the users, humanity in general, anyone-not-identifying-as-shareholders--that it not be done.
Software is the only thing I can think of where the input effort of creating it is completely divorced from the output work it can churn through. The right program at the right time, written in 10 minutes by just the right person, can save hundreds of years of otherwise manual labor.
There's a sort of sense that arithmetic got us out of the stone age, calculus fed the world, computer programming gave us the stars. That sort of power is far too important to imbue into corporations.
When you get a large group of people together, they start to think of themselves as Important. And when people think of themselves as Important, they start to think the work they do is Hard. And when they think the work they do is Hard, they start to think the software to help them do their work should be Complex. And none of it comes out of anything other than "we have a large group of people together."
Like, microkernel operating systems have a reputation for being slow based on early experiments with them from the 1980s. There are modern microkernel systems that are perfectly fast and efficient and yet people still think "monolith go brrrrrr" and not "all my software lives here" is the reason Linux is any good.
Like, I've seen people pitching blockchain-based solutions for municipal information and issue-reporting services, like anything beyond the most basic, not-completely-incompetent, traditional RDBMS is really necessary for such a project.
Like, there's a serious cohort of economists that think that the best way to handle social safety benefits is to just give them to everyone who asks, no questions asked, because otherwise the management of welfare benefits gets to be so expensive that it eclipses any potential savings against "fraud". And I'm inclined to believe them.
I see people talk about "there's no such thing as a 10x programmer". I think these people have been stuck in ossified institutions so long that they have no idea what it looks like to see a person fly. Cut away 90% of the currently employed software developers. Dissolve the Googles and Facebooks of the world. Don't replace them with anything. Leave us with the 10% of crafstpeople who can actually work through a problem on their own. And make them report directly to the C-suite. No more middle managers. No more grunt work of CRUD forms. If it can be done on paper than it's a waste of time to write software to do it.
[0] AKA this is a feeling, not something I've created a double-blind randomized trial to study, dear pedantic HN reader.