Only complete idiots actually work for a living in this day and age. A job is first and foremost a tool to get approved for a nice/nicer mortgage so that you can focus on your real career which is getting rich from real estate appreciation. Secondly a job is a tool for getting exposed to the right people so you can get an even better job and thus an even nicer mortgage. You can't waste your time at the office by actually working.
There were plenty of people working very hard on things that had no path to profitability/utility (beyond the attempt to get higher-ups promoted for "showing impact" or "ownership") or whatever. This was paired with incentives at this time for managers to have more underlings.
I have no idea of the ratio of this to "day in the life" TikToks, but there were lots of people working on things that had no utility or time horizon to be "valuable" in the business sense.