It's wild to me that this is the case, but my observation is the same. So many people are employed just to keep team sizes up and prop up dead projects.
I spent all 2021 working on a project with 10 other developers plus management. Another team was building a replacement at the same time. The existing project was a non-starter for technical and political reasons.
The existing project didn't have many real deliverables. The majority of the work was refactoring that would only pay off if we had years of usage of the original product.
Maybe it makes sense that it was better to throw literally millions of dollars at that project to keep the developers busy until the new project was ready to scale up.
If they don't spend money then their budget shrinks and their empire shrinks.
It's a total waste of money but it doesn't matter as long as they have an excuse that works for their boss. It's all about plausible deniability.
Plausible deniability is also why higher-ups will buy expensive, bloated, enterprise software/hardware. If something goes wrong they can at least claim they bought "industry standard software". Which is something that can be fed to non-technical C-level execs and board members.
I spent all 2021 working on a project with 10 other developers plus management. Another team was building a replacement at the same time. The existing project was a non-starter for technical and political reasons.
The existing project didn't have many real deliverables. The majority of the work was refactoring that would only pay off if we had years of usage of the original product.
Maybe it makes sense that it was better to throw literally millions of dollars at that project to keep the developers busy until the new project was ready to scale up.