You're absolutely correct on that. The technology industry, at least the segment driven by VC (which is a huge portion of it), is funded based on ideas that the capital-owning class thinks is a good idea. Reducing labor costs is always an easy sell when you're trying to raise a round.

Even in boring development jobs. For example, one of my first development jobs was for a large hospital, building an intranet app to make nurse rounds more efficient so they didn't have to hire as many.