I was going to reply to a go further up but yes this has absolutely crept into many other technical areas. I had a similar grad school as others here have expressed but I didn’t stay in academia after school.

I’ve worked the past 15 years or so for several different F100 companies in various technical R&D functions. These companies manufacture real things and generally have labs, resources, and staff that rival but the very best academic institutions. The politics and worldviews with which the MBAs have infect the technical teams with the last 20 or so years is palpable.

I know there used to be real in-depth research done; talking to the old timers and looking through old technical reports showed that to me. Doing that now will quickly get you RIFed. Now quickly getting to revenue and moving onto the next project is all that matters. Nothing is retained in classic 20-30 page technical reports that help build true institutional knowledge or even allow us to repeat projects based on the learnings from 2 years ago. If you are smart you quickly learn how to test and validate things to make whomever the customer is happy (following the $) while providing the bare minimum to the lawyers to make a specific marketing claim. In practice this means I’ve become very good at not opening certain doors during research (ie the ones that I intuitively know have a high likelihood of derailing a project) even if they probably should have been. See no evil, hear no evil…

It’s sad.

Yes, over the past few decades, that sentence applies to every institution I can think of. Academia, government, business, religion, medicine... I don't know why administration has turned into such a plague, but it keeps absorbing larger shares of our money, power, and time to do less and less with more and more.