Comment by RogerL

You assume they were talking about a single product. at my job there is essentially endless amounts of small tasks. We have many products and clients we have many internal needs, but can't really justify the human capital. Like I might write 20 to 50 Python scripts in a week just to visualize the output of my code. Dead boring stuff like making yet another matplotlib plot, simple stats, etc. Sometimes some simple animations. there is no monstrosity being built, this is not evidence of tagging on features or whatever you think must be happening, it's just a lot of work that doesn't justify paying a bay area principal engineer salary to do in the face of a board that thinks the path to riches is laying off the people actually making things and turning the screws on the remaining people struggling to keep up with the workflow.

Work is finite, but there can be vastly more available than there are employees to do it for many reasons, not just my personal case.