Comment by antonvs

There's another perspective on this, which is that the entire function of mature corporations is to codify what's needed to perform certain functions mechanistically, eliminating the need for expertise. Sure, you might have product development or R&D but they're not part of the daily customer-facing function of the corporation.

That's why when private equity buys a company, the first thing they often do is shut down any new product development or R&D. They want to run the machine and extract profit from what it does now - a cash cow - without taking risks on changing a working model. In this model, new product development is for startup ventures, not mature companies whose DNA doesn't tend to be a good fit for it anyway.

tl;dr: What you're describing is the system working as designed and intended. For better or worse.