Companies prefer growing revenue to cutting costs typically.

Don’t will depend if there are many projects with a good outlook sitting around.

My stance has always been to lean on the available tools to free up time to work on the more interesting problems that deliver value to the organisation / company. Has been a good strategy to date.

Sadly, the current environment does not reflect that in my experience. There is a vicious focus on keeping profit margins at a steady rate at all costs while slashing spend on tooling which requires re-work on solved problems. :/

At some point the music is going to stop and it's not going to be pretty I suspect. :(

organizations that don't trust their engineers to work towards delivering value (by using better tooling, efficiency increasing automation etc), means that they don't improve and is accepting the current status quo.

That's why you need to keep an eye out, and smell whether the management understands it or not. Plan to leave, as your value contribution will not give you back the reward that such contributions deserve in this type of organization.

Tooling has made us vastly more efficient since the days of FORTRAN and punch cards, which has caused millions more of us to be able to employed in the field. Few companies could afford websites built with ancient tech, but everyone can afford websites built with recent tech and, as a result, everyone has one.

NB: Firing 20% of employees requires a 25% increase in efficiency by the simple math.

That's the very superficial theory, but in practice it means your company can do 20% more (?? I can't math) work. I've worked in B2C companies for years and there's always more work, never a point where they have to downsize.

If the Mythical Man Month were real..then yes that would be the case.

What actually happens is software development gets cheaper and you do more stuff with the same people.