> Instead in the corporate world we have layers of layers of management demanding progress reports and skill assessments and performance rankings and velocity audits and what have you. I'm sure this eats way more time than if they just spent a couple of hours every now and then working with and asking things of the people who do the actual work.

This rings very true in my experience. Every new layer, every new TPM organization adds more overhead. They start off with “were gonna boost productivity and get things done faster!” but when that doesn’t happen the result is a demand of more process, more bureaucracy, more JIRA/story point blah blah all of which ultimately falls on the engineers who still have to do the actual work but now have to learn how to bullshit the bureaucracy.