It's not a mystery, it's exploitation.
With all the business efficiencies we've made with computers as devs and IT, we should all be working 3 days weeks, instead a few people are so rich they can buy elections.
It's never going to work like that, and you don't need any dastardly, sinister, or conspiratorial explanations for why. It's a natural side effect of the market being competitive.
When tools and technology make people more efficient, some people take that to mean they can work fewer hours and get the same job done. Which is true. But other people take that to mean they can work the same amount of hours, and get way more done. This is also true.
In a market in which two companies are competitors, and one takes the former approach and one takes the latter, which company do you think will still be around in ten or twenty years? Obviously the latter. And that pressures people in the former group to demand more output and stable working hours so they can remain competitive.
That is an argument of faith (that companies where employees work longer survive more than companies that optimise differently), and I am not convinced it is supported by evidence.
One could argue that all other things being equal, companies with employees doing more hours are more productive (even though I seriously doubt that, there are diminishing returns very quickly). But then I would argue that if a company drives their employees harder, there are leadership and management issues, so other things are not equal. And this is associated with younger workers (adaptable: good, inexperienced: less good), high turn-over (so, long-term information retention issues) and lower worker satisfaction (so the whole thing is self-defeating in the long term).
Besides, there are many, many factors involved that have nothing to with with working time. Again, leadership, strategy, operations, marketing, personal connections, dumb luck…
Personally I think there is an optimum somewhere, and at some point you get more out of your workers by making them more invested and motivated than making them work longer.
But everywhere I have seen people overworked has terrible morale and low productivity in spite of the hours.
I think it also remains to be proven that the company that works their employees the hardest will necessarily outcompete the others.
It’s not necessary that the longer hours actually translate into productivity, just that the boss feels like it should.
Well, good organizing, too.
Yet after 100 years of explosive technological growth we still have the labouring hours of the 1930s...
The result was that business owners invested in their workers and long term health of their business so it would continue to give them 10 mm per year instead of trying to cash everything out every 1/4.
Your source of confusion seems to be not recognizing that sometimes in life multiple things can be true at once. "Heroism" is generally about the actions of the individuals in response to a dangerous scenario, not how the scenario came about in the first place. "Success" is more overloaded, but can refer to both the overall system in place and the outcome of a given dangerous scenario, again separate from what caused that scenario to come about. This is near perfectly true in particular if, as is usually the case, the ones dealing with merde-hitting-spinning-blades on the ground are not the leadership. It may be idiotic, short sighted, lazy, inept leadership that lead to the problem (or it may simply be an unforeseen alignment of holes in the cheese), but if people on the ground go above and beyond to prevent the worst that's still heroic of them, personally. And if their efforts work that's a success. It'd be pretty strange to insist that the efforts of firefighters shouldn't be recognized just because somebody else did something stupid that resulted in a fire.
Yes, it's absolutely just as important what comes after. Ideally it's like the commercial aviation industry, where heroism on the parts of flight crews can be recognized and said heroism results in a top-to-bottom full systemic investigation and efforts to ensure that ideally nobody will ever be heroes in quite that way ever again. And have constant efforts to make sure heroism isn't ever required in the first place.
The opposite extreme of some organization using it as an excuse for inaction and cheapness (at least until the day arrives when heroic efforts are not enough and a true disaster really does occur) is abominable. Even worse, because in that sort of utterly failed leadership environment the people on the ground will probably get scapegoated too. And it's 100% worth acknowledging that there can be a "success trap" and Normalization Of Deviance situation here, where heroics keep averting the worst which lets bad leadership/management escape correction. But it's a trap precisely because each individual failure can still be bad, up to and including literally people dead, so the pressure to succeed is still there each time.
But if employees, be they civilian or military for that matter, perform far beyond the call of duty why would that ever not be heroic?