Or increase sales from $1B to $1.001B, or increase efficiency of 1,000 of those employees by $1,000. If literally nobody is viewing a dashboard then it's probably useless, but even a small number of views could have very high value.
Other possibility: I had a non-programmer friend who worked at BigCo and worked hard for 2 months out of the year, doing nothing the other 10 months. He asked his boss for stuff to do and the boss said "just try to look busy". Seems like a good case for outsourcing, but that 2 months of work was pretty important and in-house employees will generally be more reliable and knowledgeable (about the company specifically). So really they were being paid (not much btw) for the 2 months of work and spend the rest of the time being prepared. This was an extreme and obvious case but I suspect this type of thing is pretty common, just usually people get busy-work (eg "make this BI dashboard") rather than being told "try to look busy".
I think there is something to be said for having sufficient staff to handle peak capacity. If you run a lean ship, you are likely to run into situations where existing resources cannot handle the demand and/or headcount attrition leaves you with a gap. It takes months to onboard someone and make them productive.
The flip side of that is the peons are not told the company over-hired and the headcount are being paid "just in case". Which leads to corporate shenanigans where BS work materializes to make people feel busy.
Other possibility: I had a non-programmer friend who worked at BigCo and worked hard for 2 months out of the year, doing nothing the other 10 months. He asked his boss for stuff to do and the boss said "just try to look busy". Seems like a good case for outsourcing, but that 2 months of work was pretty important and in-house employees will generally be more reliable and knowledgeable (about the company specifically). So really they were being paid (not much btw) for the 2 months of work and spend the rest of the time being prepared. This was an extreme and obvious case but I suspect this type of thing is pretty common, just usually people get busy-work (eg "make this BI dashboard") rather than being told "try to look busy".