He said in the talk that “people are working ridiculous hours without needing to”, but I think it’s a bit naive to think that that was not the point all along. It’s like every movie ever when someone dies, follow the money and whoever just put out a high dollar life insurance policy on the victim is almost always the guilty party.
There’s likely more to it that - e.g. someone read a book somewhere and decided to increase their feelings of control, but ultimately someone wrote that book. And the managers always say like “we’ll just put this for now and adjust later if we need to”, but then make it enormously difficult to change it whenever that would be needed. They act shocked every time - shocked I tell you, shocked!:-P - whenever their estimate based on not knowing the first thing about what they are talking about ends up being wrong (how could this be!?).
I am comforted by having watched Star Trek TOS and seen engineering estimates treated the same way. So apparently this style of management predates AGILE, and even PCs:-P.