No seriously, companies hired developers just to starve the competition of talent, raise more investment etc. It was a genuine thing, that left a lot of developers doing pretty meaningless work. A similar thing happens for managers in big orgs, who want bigger headcounts to inflate their power in the org. You get thumb twiddling and initiatives to justify the headcount.

It's probably changing now as VC cash floods into AI instead of web app startups, but I am not talking out of my ass, it's a well known phenomenon.

The industry does not incentivise or reward lean software, the software input for a lot of "software" companies doesn't require it, that's fine. Exactly as you said they're businesses, they do what makes money and go where incentives take them. That cuts both ways, they are not disincentived to have a lot of wasted dev hours, at least not historically.