[jsmeaton]

> feels like busy work just so management can “see” progress

Lot's of people feel like this. I usually come at it a different way - we're trying to estimate effort to see if we want to attempt building it in the first place. Assisting with the cost-benefit question if you will. That's the first reason.

It can also be extremely beneficial to the team, particularly when working with less experienced folks. You can farm out a lot of the work and parallelise the task.

I suspect Jacob didn't do much of this breakdown when implementing his streak app, which is why he recurses in an illustrative way.