> If you don’t include some measure of employee satisfaction, retention, wellness, etc, then you will optimize the system at their expense.

I would go further and say: if your process cannot tolerate the things you should expect when working with humans (e.g. someone needing to go to the toilet, someone staying home sick), it is just a badly designed process.

As you said the cost of overreaching will show somewhere else. Maybe not immediately, but it will. And if you are unlucky it will show up with a literal bang and blood on your hands.