I'm the first to attack "useless busywork" employees, but my experience at a large, uh, software firm at this time was there were loads of "promo doc"/pet projects going on.

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.