My last on-boarding, for example, I thought was approximately the right balance. Bootstrap the most basic credentials, set up MFA that covers 90% of your needs, get your access badge, take care of HR stuff, get walked through the HR stuff you will need to set up in the next month or so (health insurance, etc.), get handed a list of resources you will probably find useful, sit through a talk about company principles, and then you're off to meet your team where the remaining 80% of your on-boarding that is more specific to your division/team/role will happen. Your laptop will be waiting for you at your desk.
I think, for example, being made to walk through exercises querying the company org chart app is superfluous, but handing you a cheat sheet that includes the URL to get to the org chart app is a great idea.
Of course, there are places that are run by egocentric upper management that aren't qualified and won't listen... in which case my comments don't apply, but I don't think that is the norm.
In my experience it's not an issue of egocentric upper management. It's an issue of a process that is 80% tuned and for various hard to solve organizational reasons it doesn't get to 90%+ tuned.
For example, in my own latest onboarding about two years ago, in hindsight I definitely feel that about 1 hour of it was dubiously useful and was a political concession to someone playing visibility games, out of about 6 hours of up front orientation.
I think that grade of "off for reasons but not always good ones" is the norm. It's like the event planning equivalent of that one corner of the code that makes no sense because someone bikeshedded it last year.
If using the company directory is necessary to know, then something is needed, then why not try to user something fun? really though, I think the real problem here is probably that this company doesn't really need all employees to know how to use the company directory.
Hiring (or training) good managers is very hard, even more so for engineering managers. But it’s so bad as an employee to have a manager that doesn’t advocate for you, good people will leave, and that’s just a downward spiral.
The process was surely designed with good intentions, perhaps by committee. And it's been designed to help those that need help.
For those that don't need help, these things suck.
Providing an out for new hires who don't need this handholding is problematic. You can't just make this stuff optional. You don't know what you don't know, and junior devs often think they know more than they do. Too many people would miss information they actually need. I think a senior-level engineer needs to understand this, and be able to cope with the anguish. Sometimes there are actually useful processes in place, but only useful for a select few, but because it's impossible to know who those few are, everyone must go through it.
There are usually ways for anyone to affect change in an organization, but unless you've been specifically hired to make changes, you're going to have to wait a while, and even then, you may never be able to make the changes you really want. But such is life. Figure out what truly matters to you, in the long term, and you'll likely find you'll become much more influential amongst your peers, and even upper management. If you can't change the things that matter to you, don't torture yourself further; it's probably time to move on.
On the flip side: if you just want to work for a smooth-running, well-oiled machine that aligns with your ideals already, good luck on your search!