All those parents who are forced to work but always wanted to stay back and provide best care for their kids but couldn't do so.. feeling a gut punch.
Parents who chose career path and gets the slap in the face moments every time they realized that they could have spent more time with the kids instead of the work.
Is it possible to eat the cake and have it too?
I've seen reflections of OP in a lot of parents in my life. They fall into two categories:
Type As that direct this sort of extreme level of effort to anything they do.
Anxiety/OCD that just can't let that little bit of benefit go combined with satisfying their complusion of controlling everything.
A long time ago, when I had only one child I made a joke to one of my coworkers that had twins. It was something like that child care was O(N), so she had the double of problems.
Now I have two small children (and a big one), and now I'm convinced that it's at least O(N^2). [In my case O(5) not O(9), because the old one is old enough.]
For the people in my life that sound similar to the OP they do the reverse. They add parenting work until their capacity is full. If you gave them and extra 3 hours in the day they'd still be just as busy.