I think it comes down to what industry you are working in, who you are, what kind of projects you are doing etc. As I wrote elsewhere my company is having success along those lines (working 3 days a week) but we are also not cheap so that changes our option space quite a lot.
The writers industry is a pretty shitty paid one unless you are famous so you really won't find many stories there.
But if you take larger companies who already have a good business you often see that they are wasting quite a lot of their time being inefficient and working long hours doesn't change that.
The premise is that you are as productive, or even more, in four hours than you are in eight, so how well you're paid should be irrelevant. The fact that journalists often work crazy hours would imply that they can indeed produce more in more hours than they could in fewer hours.
These big corps would love to eliminate their wastefulness, and if you could tell them how, you would be a very rich man. Simply observing wastefulness and then making the leap to "oh, let's just eliminate the waste and take the time off" is exactly the kind of "not adding up" I was referring to.
First off all being more productive does not mean making more money or being more successful it just means higher output. Depending on who you are that can mean a lot of different things.
For one if you spend all your time writing to make money you don't have time to necessarily get new work. I.e. there are diminishing returns on working more. Anyone who have done all nighters know this for a fact. If your mind is only occupied with one thing you don't get it in perspective and thus gets slowed down. So thats just one way to show why working more doesn't give you more.
Second of all I would love if you didn't put words in my mouth. I simply observed that large companies DO have a lot of waste i.e. that people work a lot but do not necessarily get work done which is an indication that it's not just heresay. But you can go into a lot of organizations and see that how some teams spend a lot of time and get very little done while others get a lot done in no time. Sometimes it's because some projects are more difficult than others but plenty of time it's not. Has nothing to do with prescribing what companies should do simply that there is some merit that time spent != productivity or perhaps a better word is useful output.
Thirdly TreeHouse did it this way. Doberman is doing it, and Google is to an extent doing it plus my company do it.
Just because there isn't a lot of companies who do it doesn't mean they couldn't be just as you don't judge the feasibility of remote work based on the number of companies doing it.
The writers industry is a pretty shitty paid one unless you are famous so you really won't find many stories there.
But if you take larger companies who already have a good business you often see that they are wasting quite a lot of their time being inefficient and working long hours doesn't change that.