I don't think software companies ship UI churn because they're running out of things to do with their development resources. They're just bad at rewarding bug fixing and bad at saying no to user-visible changes that aren't meaningful improvements big enough to overcome the pain of making users re-learn a changed UI. Microsoft doesn't need to scale down their Windows development resources, they just need to make them do the less-fun parts of their jobs instead of shipping new intern project rewrites of Notepad.

nah, it's just people wanting to pad their resume. And your resume is usually first read by someone who's only impressed by stuff they can see