It would be a real tragedy if they discovered you could write a webapp such that all such "pushing around the plate" activity could be done via CSS. But of course that is insufficient "drag" to dissipate managements excess energy, so this activity requires backend work as well.
Note that this only applies to management at cash cow businesses - startups have plenty of real work to do. This sets up an interesting dimension in the tension between the needs of Enterprise ("make small changes labor intensive") and startups ("make large changes quickly"): too much developer productivity would eliminate 80% of a huge set of bullshit jobs.
You guys seem to be pinning this on developers, but 90% of this comes from ux designers and sometimes product. Devs are usually "just tell me what to do"
You can if you do it with an A/B test where you can argue about the percentage of treatment, the duration of the test (is the difference persistent?), and do precise time tracking to log how long the user takes to take an action. That'll bury the actual change in a mountain of configuration, documentation, rollout plans, etc.
Note that this only applies to management at cash cow businesses - startups have plenty of real work to do. This sets up an interesting dimension in the tension between the needs of Enterprise ("make small changes labor intensive") and startups ("make large changes quickly"): too much developer productivity would eliminate 80% of a huge set of bullshit jobs.