I think this may be a misattribution of what soaks up time: is it the change itself or the friction of the process of making that change? e.g. code changes are

I think this may be a misattribution of what soaks up time: is it the change itself or the friction of the process of making that change? e.g. code changes are easy but merging and build procedures take a log of time, encouraging larger batches of concurrent work.