Like asking for a 6months dev work to help them save 1 hour annually on an annoying task they had to do.
If I were designing an organization with such a division of labor, those wouldn't be different job descriptions but different activities within a single job description; maybe I'd spend 22 days a month doing product-engineer stuff like adding features, and 3 days a month doing support-engineer stuff like visiting customer sites, diagnosing customer problems, and answering calls, while maybe hatchnyc would prefer to spend 22 days a month doing support-engineer stuff and 3 days a month doing product-engineer stuff. The reason is that, doing either activity, you gain an enormous amount of knowledge that's crucial to the other activity, but very difficult to even put into words, much less into a knowledge base.
Bill Gates found it useful to answer tech support calls as late as 01989: https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/289857
This is good, but it's easier when you're a very extraordinary human, and your own boss!
I see this as a complaint a lot, but... in a private company, they're the ones writing the checks. So if they want to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to save an hour, that's their prerogative. It's certainly our obligation to point out the cost (including ongoing maintenance) but again in a private company you don't really have the option of saying "no" except with your feet.
I do however agree with leaving any organization that does not allow you to express disagreement.
After that, I really really don't care anymore, that's someone else's problem. I've played that soapbox and it's a waste of my time and energy. I make sure responsibility is passed back, documented and proceed. If you want to throw hundreds of thousands or millions at me and whomever to some wasteful request, go for it. You have the option, you've been warned, and I've given you a valid excuse to proceed with high risk, high uncertainty of ROI option with everyone important involved.
I do a lot of contractual/consulting work so even warning can mean early termination of work forward, so I'm taking a risk even informing you (some people actually listen and work stops early during consulting time and development follow up never occurs, these are the smart people and they're bad for my livelihood)--I could just do whatever you ask and get paid. If I were salaried, there's even less risk of me losing income forward by informing so I say in those cases just do your professional due diligence go let people know it's a bad idea without creating political land mines for anyone, then allow them to step on land mines at their own discretion.
Now imagine a government entity where the users and the dev are both paid by the gov.
It could be something that's tricky. While the optimal case is 1h of work, if something goes wrong then its doing forensic auditing on the books in 3 months and spending lots of time there.
It could be something that needs to be repeatable. Yes, it's 1h, but before this was done Alice did it and before that Bob did it. They did it slightly differently and that cause problems. Having a computer program do it provides change management to the process of doing that task.
It could be something that needs auditing. Tying into the previous two, having a "this is how it's done and all the calculations that go into it along with a test suite" makes it easier to be assured that it is working correctly.
There are lots of things outside of the purview of a developer working on doing whatever task needs to be done to solve a problem. The value of the problem being solved is the issue of the manager or the customer.
As long as they're being otherwise reasonable, I don't have a problem doing something that doesn't seem terribly "important" to me either. However, in my career I've had many frustrating instances where they were demanding something in a timeframe that I couldn't deliver it without ensuring that there wouldn't be any unintended side effects - and then blaming me for the side effects when they came up. I only push back when they don't realize how complex what they're asking for is. Of course, then they play the "tell me how long it's going to take so I can argue with you until you agree that it will take as long as I originally asked for" game.
Far too few developers understand: just because the people writing the checks ask you to do it and you implemented it exact as they ordered you to doesn't mean the people writing the checks will take responsibility for the resulting bad situations that can lead to them not writing you checks anymore. If anything, you'll be used as a scapegoat to prevent them from not getting any more checks written.
In general I think there is a huge advantage if developers know first hand how their product is being used and not through gatekeepers.
It sounds like what you're describing is the lack of such prioritization. It isn't necessary to keep the developers ignorant of new user "demands" in order to prioritize them; they just need to be empowered to follow the priorities the team has chosen instead of accommodating every demand.
Sometimes it's easier to accommodate a demand than to write up a card and estimate it, though. Sometimes a bug fix or layout tweak is obvious enough that doing it takes only a minute or two; then, it's just a question of process overhead whether the actual cost of doing it is five minutes or five hours: potentially multiple forwarded email round trips, a fresh checkout, pair programming or other code review, compilation time, test suites, commit comments, merge requests.
Usually, in my experience, if you have extreme overhead, most of those changes never get requested, because they don't get prioritized the way they would with the order-of-magnitude lower cost a lightweight process can provide. The result is that they never get done, so the product is full of easily observable minor problems, which is experienced as shoddiness.