>I genuinely don't understand who looked at this policy change and thought "this will probably help with people working more".

Lawmakers aren't smarter than average people. In fact, they're often more out of touch with reality despite fancier education and credentials. They just make laws based on feels to score brownie points with a certain voter base or demographic. In this case it's with retired boomers who think young workers today are too weak and dodging work to sit at home doing nothing on the taxpayer's dime because that's the impression they got from the tabloid media who portrays zoomers and immigrants as lazy and avoiding work living on welfare.

For example in Austria during Covid the government shortened supermarket opening times to so called "protect our service workers" while missing the fact that this meant that people were now doing the same volume of shopping but spread over a smaller time period of the day, which meant more crowds and less social distancing, meaning more chance of spreading the virus.

So not only were they actually NOT protecting the supermarket workers with this measure, on the contrary, but they were also actively making the spread worse through the increased crowds of shoppers. But nobody in the public understood this second order effect, and actively cheered for this measure as a sign the government care about the average worker. That's how laws are passed nowadays, cheap low-iq populism with zero though for the second order effects and externalities on others.