OK, so imagine that middle-manager person stopped dealing with nonsense politics and took on a role in eng or sales or whatever. Would the nonsense politics disappear?
I honestly think it would decrease. There are more managers than management work so they start creating their own work. That applies to all roles when there are too many people. Designers will redesign constantly when they have nothing else to do, programmers will refactor evertyhing, bureaucrats will create rules.
