Agreed. Where do you guys work to be monitored like that?

I dick around all day at work, I watched YouTube video in the background, I still use paper notes so my cursor can be still for an hour sometimes, etc and I never received anything like that. That's over 4 employers since I went full time remote.

Not saying they're not "watching" me, but they don't seem to care.

Is there a typical profile for companies that go that far in the 1984 crazyness?

Besides paper notes and brainstorming with my own self on my whiteboard, I sometimes disconnect from the vpn and put myself offline in MSTeams for several hours, telling my manager and direct teammates that they can use pagerduty to ping me if urgency calls for my immediate availability, when wanting to focus on a specific task/piece of code/resesrch/document/architecture decision.

Context switches can really kill productivity. So much that sometimes I do much more work in a 2h window between 7am and 9am than the next 6-7 hours.

Hard disagree. I've worked at multiple companies that care about security. Monitoring employee equipment use for activity that could indicate a compromise is a positive signal.

I guess the Q that bothers me the most is who has access to my activity, when it was accessed and why.

I agree. I worked at a company that has this endpoint monitoring software and occasionally got emails saying "was it you that ran this command". I just said "yes" and they were like "ok carry on".

I'm not sure how much value there is in that kind of monitoring, but it isn't necessarily bad.