Anyone else bothered by pointlessness?

It doesn't seem to be extremely common, but it does seem to be something that happens with some of the biggest names here, where authors devote large chunks of their word count to scenes that don't actually contribute to the story in any way. Has anyone else noticed this happening?

Off the top of my head, I can think of D Schinhofen does this a fair bit. It's also really common with Shirtaloon and Brinks.

I adore He Who Fights With Monsters, and Defiance of the Fall, but...

Well, HWFWM is plagued with plot-random barbeque-random food-randomness-plot. This made sense early on, when we were establishing Jason's personality, and later when Jason was recovering. But in a recent Patreon chapter I read we literally go from dealing with intrigue, to a paragraph or two where Jason is cooking for people, and back to the plot.

Like, that segment doesn't add anything, at all. The one I am thinking of didn't even have dialogue. It felt random, out of place, and even the slice of life aspect didn't really contribute.

I am pretty sure Jason doesn't have an employment contract with Shirtaloon requiring Jason have a certain amount of screen time, even if he isn't doing something (given that Jason is a fictional character), so it really does feel like it's only there to hit a word count amount.

Defiance of the Fall doesn't really do the random slice of life stuff that doesn't contribute to the plot, and isn't even good slice of life. Instead I find the issue with Brinks stuff is... well, he has the Anne Rice factor in his works.

Anne Rice is kinda famous, with her vampire books, for spending four pages just describing what someone is wearing, and an entire chapter describing what a room looks like (hyperbole, obviously, but not by much), and I see this a lot when it comes to Defiance of the Fall and the descriptions leading up to fights. Not so much the fights themselves, but there is only so often you can spend 5 minutes reading about the cultivation behind an attack, then you get three lines of fighting, then another 5 minutes describing the cultivation behind this other attack.

The most recent book has a section where 4 paragraphs are spent with the MC talking about what he can sense from some scar that is remnant from an attack, then we get half a paragraph of him moving and hiding, then he ducks into a building and spends 4 more paragraphs talking about, basically, the same thing, in almost the same way.

I can't help but feel if some of the big names out there put as much effort into making their stories tight, like Wight does, or that make their individual stories focused, like Rowe does, we'd lose 20-50% of the word count, but they'd be so much more enjoyable to read - and more enjoyable should equate to more people coming on board, or staying with the series.

Thoughts?