I mean idk if it's that interesting a story, but: I was the senior character artist on a fairly small mobile team. I won't mention the name of the studio or the game cause most of the people I worked with were lovely and it's not their fault the mobile market is what it is.
the main monetisation hook in this game(sidenote: I left before the game released, so it could be completely different now. idk, I haven't followed it) was unlocking clothing and costume items for your character. I love character customisation, so I was happy to be designing and making lots of cute stuff, and I was given pretty free rein with what I was making. we had a mix of relatively normal clothing items(tshirts and shorts, skirts, hats etc) with wacky costumes like unicorn, pirate, etc. you'd get a couple bits and bobs in a loot box and slowly build up your collection, try to complete the costumes, etc.
one day the designer comes to me like 'so we have a problem with the lootboxes: they're giving away all the really cool costumes too fast. we need to slow it down or people won't buy enough lootboxes 🤑(they were really fond of that emoji and it made me die inside every time) can you make some more plain clothes to pad out the drop table? how many can you make?'
how many can I make? man, watch me. I made a spreadsheet of items and colours, I modeled a few more basic pieces to fill out what we had and then I went to fucking town with a batch file and windows powertoys to automate duplicating and renaming. I still had to reassign all the material swatches by hand but I blasted the prodigy into my ears and ground it out. designer was hoping for 200 items in three weeks, I gave them 1000. and a document detailing how I did it, so even a more junior artist could do it next time. and they were like 'wow this is great, I can trickle out the costumes super slowly now! 🤑🤑 can you make even more??'
see, it wasn't so much 'making plain stuff is boring'. is kinda is, but there's a lot of far more boring tasks out there and I'd rather make a thousand plain tshirts than fill out a hundred goddamn JIRA tickets. as the above paragraph suggests, finding methods to churn out tons of Stuff can even be fun in its own way. but when the Stuff is literally just filler to stop people from getting too much 'Good Stuff', to bog them down so they'll feel pressured to spend money on some gacha shit, it feels really fucking bad.