This is absolutely the reality. Previous company my first project was on team "improving reporting", and chasing all kinds of gnarly performance tuning to make queries and sorting faster, etc. Once we did all this after a few months, come to find out the PM requesting all this missed that what users wanted was one number in hundreds of rows, and sorting so it would show on top...

The team did not like that I pointed out we could have added the number to the home page in a few minutes...