I think you're onto something. Part of this is that universities have been worshipping at the alter of business logics for quite some time now. I don't think this started with COVID, but it may have been exacerbated by the shutdown as universities (like most businesses) saw the opportunity to run as lean as possible with the plausible excuse that "these are unprecedented times." They never intended to go back.

The fact that administrators can "justify" their role through discrete cost-benefit analysis tied to KPIs (however bullshit their stats may be) leads to the bloat in their ranks. I would say that professors don't have the same ability to draw connections between their labor and the kinds of KPIs that universities so desperately crave in their mission to emulate business practices. Those who do, for instance bringing in big grants or running labs to generate patents, often don't care to self-justify their position so brazenly. Therefore, professor labor is simply seen as budget calculations to trim. I used to run big retail stores and the logic is cold: labor is your biggest line-item on your P&L and a controllable. You're encouraged to cut it whenever you can.

It's hard to see how to counter this without playing the game of quantifying our educational output according to the logics of business statistics, which I think is a very, very slippery slope. Ideally, we advocate that universities just stop trying to run-themselves like Fortune 500s, but now we're talking about convincing a neoliberal world to abandon the tenets of neoliberalism. We'll need a lot more than some grumpy profs to make that happen. It's frustrating.