It is.

Even more astonishing, at least to me, is that it is what some, maybe even a lot of, employees are looking for as well. Without an employer, or someone who they can submit to the authority of, to tell them what to work on when, they would be miserable and directionless. They crave structure, but need someone else to define it for them. They also become quite incensed when someone wants to remove that same structure because it gets in their way.

Some jobs allow or require a certain amount of this. Generally, it is jobs that are part of an established process, like manufacturing, that just needs someone to repetitively perform a particular step with reasonably consistently. This might be true of most jobs.

Other jobs do very poorly being treated as part of an established process. But people will select candidates for that anyway, because it works in the average case. The result of this is attempting to swaddle process around something inherently without process, just so the people involved can feel comfortable with the structure that guides their work. It does mean that productivity tends to suffer as a result of all of the process requirements, but many employers and employees consider it a worthwhile trade-off.

I get the sense that it's not that the line is fine, but that so many people toe it so tightly that, to someone who doesn't, it looks fine by comparison.