I've worked in large academic institutions and currently work in a giant private corporate behemoth and see a lot of the same issues. I think what it comes down to is a couple of things:
* For a lot of people, status means not having to learn or update/change anything about yourself or your way of working. We (where I work) franchise, and I see so many business owners who can't be bothered to learn email, how to log in to a computer system, etc. They shouldn't have to, they think. They're too important! In academia, this is professors in their 70s who don't want to change their teaching style or administrators who think it's the 1980s. In government, I'd expect this to be the bureaucrats who've been in their positions for 20-30+ years. Because these people have status (be that capital or tenure), the culture of the organizations leans towards pleasing them, and people who ask them to learn are stonewalled or exited.
* Related to this, people care most about what's in front of them. The veterans dying/students who have issues/clients who aren't served well are more abstract than John who doesn't want to learn and will make your life hell if you try to make him.
* In terms of resistance from the less entrenched, I think it's worth noting that for the most part, changes in the modern American workforce (especially rapid ones) very, very rarely favor the worker. Sudden changes usually mean more work for less pay, layoffs, etc. For example, my own company just switched the bonus system in what is clearly an attempt to pay people less in bonuses. The only counter-example I can think of recently is the rise of WFH, but that's already being rolled back. Changes = good for management/owners, bad for workers. This means people are going to be resistant to all change because they've learned it means bad things for them. In small enough organizations, this can be somewhat mitigated by the leaders having a personal relationship with their worker bees, but in big orgs that doesn't happen.
I also think there's a fundamental tension between the type of person you need to be in order to implement and understand systematic changes and the type of person that makes a good factory/retail/service worker. There's a lot of people at the top of society who want obedient, uncurious workers and then are shocked when there are negatives to a population filled with those kind of people. We (as a society) have completely failed in educating our population for the digital age because a lot of people make money off the general populace's ignorance, but that does mean that the general populace can't administer in a digital society.