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.
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.