Not so sure about that. The company was notorious for having teams constantly rollout competing internal libraries/tools and rewrite them over and over, obviously not having enough bottom-line work to keep everyone busy. A smaller workforce may be able to focus on the work that matters, it doesn't have to imply a lower productivity.
I have never witnessed a company at least the size of Uber where this wasn't the case. This isn't exclusively a culture thing, it's a bandwidth thing. There is limited human IO available to coordinate, and available bandwidth diminishes in proportion to org size. The org can either choose to slow down to match available IO, or run at closer to natural pace and accept duplicate work. I guess the latter must be the obvious choice, or the automatic tendency
I imagine the same problem is why so many large orgs inevitably turn into hyperstructures of insane management layer cake.. coordination overhead will eventually send everyone begging for the ability to shed work or delegate
Even if a tool should not have been written, the ability to troubleshoot it is still critical to its consumers. And making hundreds of dependent teams spend a month migrating is easily more expensive than 3 headcount to maintain it.
