“ So the game is no longer about building stuff efficiently. It's about raking in as much money as you can for as long as you can and every inefficiency that justifies further work is actually best friend of everybody involved.”

You’re describing the goals of the individual becoming divergent from the goals of the company.

In the article the writer described his team’s goals at the VFX software company as being well aligned with the goals of the company and the customers. They even stayed late because they were enjoying solving the problem so much.

The same misalignment in goals is what made Communist Russia so awful. The stated goals were about providing prosperity to all workers and citizens of the USSR, but the goals of the committees became about personal advancement and the preservation of the party. It could be argued that the extreme job security of the dictatorship allowed this situation. If there had been a way to democratically fire officials, they would have been more aligned with the goals of the people. (A politician is only as good as your ability to fire them.)

Many large companies end up like the USSR. The way to solve this is to allow teams to fire their managers.