The problem is that this miserable state of affairs works at scale.

Yes, on problems that exist at the scale of one or intelligent, educated, experienced, and dedicated human (or maybe up to 3-5), an individual or small team will run circles around a business. You can have a top-notch CEO and COO and HR manager and six program managers (each with zero domain experience other than running a Jira board) and four dozen junior consultants who memorized just enough to pass the interviews and an art department and sales and finance and IT. For some problems, that whole $50M enterprise will be utterly demolished by a couple of determined engineers.

Likewise, a monarchy with a wise, benevolent, and just king can flourish, whereas a corrupted and bureaucratically entangled democracy is woefully inefficient.

But if you want your kingdom to last more than two generations before succumbing to a greedy monarch, or want your enterprise to solve bigger problems that don't decompose nicely to small ones, to vertically integrate huge manufacturing systems and scale out to billions of units, the only method that works is the inefficient one. And it does work!

Only revisionist history tell tales of flourishing kingdoms under a just king. In reality, the reason feodality worked for so long was the anarchy and power struggle, the cavalcades (basically raids) and a honour based justice (basically don't kill fellow nobility during war, and avoid killing militantes during cavalcades and you'll be good). The anarchical nature of the system made it particularly susceptible to organised raids, but also extremely 'agile' in it's political responses. Once power was consolidated however, the clergy and the royalty pushed their law and hierarchical order onto the mostly aristocratic feodality, it broke and you get the crusade against Alby, the war between Plantagenet and capetiens, and probably a lot of other misery inflicted to the general population. Then once the hierarchical order is set, you need an administration, which will become inefficient by nature.

> The problem is that this miserable state of affairs works at scale.

It "works" in the sense that it can be kept going by patching the damage it causes by throwing more money at it.

What it mostly does at scale is appear to work, to those high enough above it that they can't see any of the details: only the metrics that are being optimized for.

The question is if the Kingdom would then still be worth surviving if life for everyone there ends up being miserable.