It's not just busy work, it's like being chained to a sandpaper treadmill especially in some specific "hot" domains like AI. It feels like you can build something with it and 3 months later you've got to update your code because half the dependencies are deprecated.
In AI, whatever you wrote is going to be deprecated in theee months, and in six months SOTA LLMs will one-shot it directly. That's what it means for a domain to be "hot". AI is currently the largest and most intense global R&D project in the history of humanity. So for this one field, your complaint makes no sense.