If it served no purpose then it wouldn't be done. Companies don't throw resources around for no reason. The article mentions that cooling servers with water is cheaper than cooling them with air conditioners, for example. If they were using air conditioners they'd be wasting money. If you really don't want them to use water because water is scarce in a particular location then make sure the water is priced appropriately and they'll switch.
The bit about salespeople using LLMs doesn't mention anything about inflating sales numbers or using LLM hype. It says:
Salespeople are apparently celebrating tools for automatically generating proposals for clients. If a salesperson's job were to communicate with and identify the needs of a client, then this wouldn't make sense, but a salesperson's job is to sell as much of a thing as possible. It is to bloat and clutter our world. Of course the people whose job it is to create bloat are excited about being able to create bloat faster.
In other words, they're just using LLMs to increase their productivity. They can do more of the same thing they're already doing by making use of them. The article labels "selling stuff" as "bloat" too. This is why I'm of the opinion that the author is really just using "bloat" to mean "stuff I don't like" at this point in the article, how is selling stuff an "excessive usage of resources"? If they're increasing their productivity then that means they're using fewer resources to sell a given amount of stuff, not more.