The part I really liked is "Is Toil Always Bad?" because quite astute psychology and management ideas appear here. My takeaway is that people who like toil (and there are many zealous oversystemetisers around) are some of the most dangerous to long-term productivity.

However, I really feel for the author, because the distance between this philosophically ambitious position and the reality of using Big Tech products - which in my life are the primary source of pointless makework activity - is sad and frustrating.

Now, one cannot blame the tools for stupid policies that lead their misuse in constructing makework processes, but (to take the Heideggerian stance) they carry certain exacerbating values along with them. Technologies can be 'seductive'.

The point of departure for me, was the definition of "overheads" as justifiable makework according to some value set. Whose values, exactly? And if, in Weber's sense, bureaucracy is an unavoidable side effect of process, then the possibility to design "toil-free" systems is really about complexity management, not post-facto eliminating toil through automation, because that will only break things and introduce more toil (Which is of course the primary theme of Gall's "Systemantics").