I think the issue with your rebuttal is that companies think they have a very specific problem that needs solving, so they need bespoke software. Just read on the various HN posts where people complain about PMs moving things around for no reason other than justifying their jobs.

Yep. And it's not just PMs.

Everyone with any responsibility for picking any software in a company will work very hard to make things harder and more expensive, rather than easier.

People will ask for a 100k-year app, or whatever is the Ferrari of their business. If they don't get it, they will ask for the complex features they saw in that 100k-year software package, even if they won't use it.

If it internal software, they will ask you to develop it. If it's another vendor, they will complain until they get what they want, increasing the cost. If it's vibe-coded, they will try to prompt that until it becomes a mess.

I had this with all sorts of people: HR, Sales, translators, artists, marketers, data analysts, testers. Even software engineers are obsessed with having the "most complete" in the shape of Amazon AWS and things like that.

The only situation where I didn't see this happening was in startups where people are actually busy.