> And no one in the security business seems to consider the overall burden of yet another step. Each of which is simple in by itself, but cumulatively they are a giant hassle, and so people look for workarounds.

This is certainly not true. I personally consider how much friction things introduce for users, things like normalizing having to reenter your password too much making phishing easier, and so on. It's well understood that you will get shadow IT, which is worse, if you make doing things the right way too difficult. I regularly advocate for streamlining processes and procedures, introducing more user-friendly systems, hosting office hours where the security team is available for any question or concern you have making us more available to the company, etc.

What's the issue? Well, for one, there's a ton of incompetent people in the field, so they'll just do whatever to make themselves look like they're working. Two, most security departments are criminally understaffed, so even if you have competent people they just have to put things together quickly and can't clean it up. Three, there's tons of idiotic regulatory and legal requirements that take forever to modernize. And finally, half of security is playing politics and arguing with the rest of the company, meaning that half the time the solutions you get are a slop of compromise with which nobody is happy.

TL;DR we aren't psychopaths without empathy, we struggle for the same reasons you developers have tech debt and other things that suck even though you would prefer not to.