I just know of at least 20 people left my previous company because we had nothing to do. Every meeting was trying to figure out what the direction was. As an engineer when the company gets to the size of 1000+ you are largely not at all empowered to solve this problem but have to rely on your manager or in some cases your managers manager.
But come time for performance review you get bad marks. If you think that many people are just lazy for no reason you have no right to be managing or running a business.
Sitting around pretending to work all day is a recipe for depression and burnout. No one wants that.
The biggest lie I ever got told at work was "all teams have equal opportunity for impact". They don't, and team+org is about 80% of your potential performance.
At the time my org had a "mission & building" group and a "maintenance & operations" group. I was placed in the maintenance group.
Every single project in the maintenance group went the same: good idea, planning & initial prototype, gets noticed by management, you get permanently blocked or management pilfers your star players and you start again or scope down. All our projects were tiny or failures. Meanwhile the people in the mission group got showered with raises and promotions.
It was soul crushing, I had never been so unhappy. I had no (opportunity for) impact on the business, so my reviews were always that I was technically strong but didn't demonstrate impact. You can get stuck in a real feedback loop there, you get burned out at constant failure.
I'm sure we all looked lazy from above, I certainly felt lazy, but the org structure simply quashed any attempts at progress and we were all powerless against it.
I ended up leaving that role, it gave me a strong focus on impact only roles which was the best career move I ever made.
That sounds like a dysfunctional organization and a good example why trying to measure "impact" in the sense you're describing is not a good idea. Let's say you're on an internal tools team that's building tools that others in the organization rely on to build whatever products your company is making money of. You might say your direct "impact" [edit: is small/zero] but your indirect impact is definitely not. In a well run company those people would be highly valued for their indirect contribution.
You're absolutely right that how a company is organized, and its culture, is directly linked to those outcomes. The ability of individuals to make impact is also very related to their being in the right position to utilize their strengths aka role fit. In a well run company managers try to optimize for all these things. Ofcourse the best intentioned managers can't always place everyone in the perfect spot and lots of projects have work that isn't super shiny but is still important.
Sounds like you made the right decision in leaving.
It sounds to me like you were in a bad fit for the role. Projects definitely have a life cycle. Prototype, build, maintain. And you typically have different types of people doing these different roles. You may not have enjoyed the role that you played - but some people really do enjoy each of those roles.
But come time for performance review you get bad marks. If you think that many people are just lazy for no reason you have no right to be managing or running a business.
Sitting around pretending to work all day is a recipe for depression and burnout. No one wants that.