Great Points!
My first job as a programmer was on a CP/M computer, that took ~2 seconds to boot from a 5 1/4 inch floppy disk, on a Z80 running at 4MHz (~1MIPS).
I asked many over the years; A modern computer executes billions of instructions per second... Many billions... So what can it possibly be doing, when Apple II got shit done at ~500,000 ops/sec? Including cores/threads, that is at least 5 magnitudes more power.
@blacklight
A friend pointed me to Parkinson's Law regarding public works projects; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law
But my guess is that something very similar happens in large private corporations too.