Why do VPs do this?

Since you're not asking for advice, I'll contribute my own rant.

There's this one VP that I worked with a lot that, in my opinion, seriously stunted my professional development to the point where I was completely unmotivated to be proactive in doing anything because I hated the dude so much. For anyone else who I (tangentially) worked with, I'd go above and beyond, lead workstreams, etc, because I enjoyed working with them and they were regular people since they were 3rd yr VP / principal level that I actually respected.

But working with a new VP that has a lot to prove, and who also is obsessive/psychotic, is honestly just a nightmare. Common behavior includes:

• Hijack numerous calls and waste time speaking nonsense, causing our calls to run late. He literally wanted to hear his own voice. An example would be repeating everything that I say to an advisor as our DD focus, and slightly changing words. Dawg, you don't have to speak or lead every single thing, and you're literally wasting time that I could be spending doing all the other bullshit you thought of
• Think long and hard about immaterial issues, and create meaningless work to address them. Buddy, no one is gonna care about this one sensitivity on COGS for this one product line that swings IRR by 15 bps. Maybe take a step back and focus on ensuring the underlying market adoption thesis is there.
• Never getting additional clarity from the MD on workstreams. Dude will call and say, "Hey, MD wanted to pull a couple pages together on [vague portco topic]. Let's create these 20 pages so that we adequately address the ask." Turns out, 10 of those pages get cut (out of scope) and the remaining 10 get combined into 5, primarily because the dude was trying to cover all bases and not think about or clarify exactly what was needed. Unfortunately, this also frequently comes directly from the VP, meaning there's no chain or communication with the larger group to suggest a more efficient approach, and I have to push back directly to the VP (much less effective).
• Despite being stressed and neurotic all the time, never does anything himself. In a lean shop, "good" VPs and principals will usually take some pages / some limited processing work. This guy will straight up write a few bullets and have the Associate do everything else, even the cover email that the VP then sends out himself.

Anyway, all this to say that a new, neurotic, and non-chill VP can make or break one's Associate experience. Between creating busywork and overanalyzing the wrong things, it becomes difficult to even care at a certain point.