The thing is, if you now look at any company and try to guesstimate the number of employees, it's going to be at least an order of magnitude higher than what you thought.

I'm pretty sure that companies doing similar stuff in e.g. 2000-2005 were like 1/10th the size, yet managed to get work done (and without the supposed productivity/automation improvements tools that appeared since that time..).

Michael Burry thinks there's something called a "white collar bubble" and I agree with him. There's a book about "bullshit jobs" which also explores this topic.