But for a large proportion of people, "what they build" is meaningless (in social terms). Doing as you suggest would eliminate the majority of work.
This current direction seems to be bad both for workers and for long-term health of companies. If they layoff enough workers and can't easily replace them because they find other uses of their time like art and creativity they risk sustainability by not being able to hire back the people they need and the skills that they trained those people to have in the first place.
The article stops short of offering proposed solutions to this current crisis, though.