I think it's just the nature of our evolutionary incentive system. Survival is king for evolution, and ensuring survival with incentives is actually fairly simple; make damage feel bad (pain) make hunger/thirst feel bad and fullness feel good, make sex feel good(but not required for it to work), socializing gives good brain buzzes, danger and fear keep us awake and alert, etc.

The relevant one is that success feels good and failure feels bad. However, all of these systems rely on raising or lowering your feelings in response to stimulation. That is inherently short term and works best with very direct feedback and short 'loops'.

Humans are simply terrible at long term success(compared to short term) because it is a process of incentive that lives entirely in the logic part of the mind, with very little animal input. And the people/organizations that reliably achieve long term successes already hijack these short term systems to achieve those successes.

This is just a tool to do that, at the end of the day. Games are designed around that animal system, mega optimized, so it makes sense to use them as a format for a productivity tool.

That's especially important now, because so many large organizations have workers that are completely detached from the final product, making the feedback EVEN WORSE.