I've noticed similar things. One of the things that bugs me the most in my organization is that managers (product owners, non-very-technical VPs) there's a push to split larger items into bite-sized chunks which can be neatly distributed amongst developers and neatly tracked by PMs. These smaller items are now inter-dependent, which result in a lot of context switches and cache misses, even on an individual scale, not to mention they are often misestimated, and sometimes flat out wrong since they come out of planning meetings rather than thoughtful, careful research.
