I have so many thoughts:

Depending on the reality, either that company doesn't understand agile very well, or you didn't understand the importance of the small steps.

A plan is not made agile by being split into many small sequential steps; what would make this agile is learning from each step and being prepared to scrap steps 2-8 if step 1 turns out to be enough. Usually this attitude results in splits that make more sense and do add user value.

OTOH I've seen many experienced folks get tripped up because it's easy to get consumed and not evaluate work vs the customer value when you're in the middle of a big task.

For example on an internationalisation project a dev thought: "Every translation key is handled the same way in Rails, let me just do them all at once"; spent weeks with the appearance of no progress because they were working through many cases often slightly more complicated than imagined. They said out loud ~ "I'm not working just for the sake of a task board, the work needs to be done, let's be better than box ticking, it's all one logically consistent piece of work".

I had to interrupt to point out that most of the pages were either about to be deleted or were only needed later. Meanwhile we had tons of work that needed this person's attention on things that were of immediate importance.

It's also important to work in a way that a high number of PRs is not a penalty. It's a smell if we're motivated to reduce the number of PRs because shipping PRs feels difficult.