It's worse than "assembly line worker." For that, a hyper-specific set of actions is created, and then commoditized workers are inserted into this rigid process. The spec/actions rarely change over time.

In "what did you do yesterday?" stand-ups, the worker is expected to establish their own personal direct actions in order to meet outside expectations and goals set by their manager/team. And then every morning someone is analyzing those actions for "blockers." A "blocker" is either a case where the manager didn't communicate effectively and/or didn't set effective scope/milestones, or else it's a code word for "you're doing it wrong" and gives the manager a change to micro-manage the specific actions the worker is taking day-to-day.

In any case, I firmly agree with you that the core message is "I don't fucking trust you even an inch."

If you want to see a bad engineering manager's brain misfire on cue (if they are of this micro-manager type), ask them why the product manager or designer on your team isn't expected to time-box and pre-estimate his/her spec. writing tasks.