It’s a marketing term pandering to insecure managers. A lot of upper management believes that they have a ton of employees who will be slacking off unless constantly watched, and they don’t trust the lower level managers to do their jobs making sure that doesn’t happen.

Sometimes that has a race or class component but I think it most often is simply that it conveniently shifts the blame for poor performance. That project didn’t fail because incompetent managers confused Accenture’s suits with competence, or because the management layers are only good at playing politics, but because the staff “quiet quit” (i.e. spent their unpaid time with their friends and families rather than gifting it to their boss).

The United States has a lot of people who either are in management or self-identify with the people at the top so a business writer can have a very easy career writing “it’s not you, it’s them” pieces like this. Our retirement system also means you have a large audience of people who have spare time, depend on stock market returns for their income, and are thus far more willing to think other people should have harsher working conditions than they personally did.