It's different if you're just processing though, there is no creativity required to check a pile of 500 invoices; you just need to get on and plough though.
But ‘just processing’ jobs also need breaks, especially if accuracy is required, even more especially if the job is safety critical. If you are doing something boring AND dangerous then you have an accident waiting to happen
In many areas leaving the office for just about anything means taking the elevator downstairs, walking through a sprawling parking lot, making a 10 minute drive to the nearest Starbucks, spending 5 minutes in the drive thru, and then reversing the whole process. I could probably justify that once a day, but upwards of 30 minutes per trip is going to be a really hard sell any more than that.
Even as a freelancer who has no one looking over my shoulder and who works from home I'm simply not going to do that - I bought a coffee maker. Take that to the far opposite extreme and consider the call center employees who have hard stats for their productivity every day and have scheduled breaks... there's simply no way they _could_ do it, even if they wanted to.
So yeah, maybe it's an indicator for _some jobs_ of a poor work quality, but that was the entire point - it's a cheap and easy way to improve that work quality.
The reason is to get people talking to each other across projects. The drop in productivity from going out for a coffee is more than offset by the benefits of cross-fertilization.