[alexpetralia]

What about the fairly obvious third possibility that some processes are simply inefficient and/or unproductive (and even counterproductive)?

For example, a manager reads a Medium article and mandates that everyone on the team spend 2 hours everyday documenting what they did yesterday.

Certainly you'd agree that there is not positive value here - maybe even negative value! This may very well be "bullshit" work!

Of course, we can find "reasons" for anything - even spending 2 hours a day on documentation - but that does not mean they are good reasons. (In fact, they are probably post hoc rationalizations.) We should not assume that just because something is the way it is, it is immediately value-adding. Nor should we assume it's immediately value-subtracting. We just shouldn't assume, which unfortunately, (2) does.