My experience is the same. There are modest gains compensating for lack of good documentation and the like, but the human bottlenecks in the process aren't useless bureaucracy. Whether or not a feature or a particular UX implementation of it makes sense, these things can't be skipped, sped up or handed off to any AI.

What are these bottlenecks specifically that you feel are essential?

Am trying to compare this to reports that people are not reviewing code any more.