It's naive to think that these decisions are made by HR, and not, your organistion's leadership — your building stuff set by the leadership, and the HR team are executing policy as set by the leadership.

100% of all the departments they seem to be the ones who have the least amount of clue about the business, the product, etc.

At my current company we had a massive, make-it-or-break-it deliverable for the spring. It was literally all departments coming together for a whole year and trying to get this thing done on time.

All, but HR. All HR cared about was to make sure managers would pester their report to put their 3 annual goals in [random HR system] before [random day in March]. HR like to see people as interchangeable cogs but that's because that's what they are themselves.