Wow. Have to reply again. I can't believe how well you have summarized MSPs in two short lines.

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I have often lamented that less than 5% of effort actually goes towards performing work that the customer actually wants and is a net positive for their business.

50% is just waste, like arguing about scope issues "we don't do that", missed SLAs, project change request details, usually about deadline slippage, and the back and forth emails asking for clarification to the point that the customer could have more easily done it themselves, and the days spent routing tickets around between different teams "not my job!"

The remaining 45% is busy work which exists solely for the reason you stated but is framed as a positive, as a contractually required deliverable. This 45% usually requires a lot of customer participation and time.

Often in fact it seems the customer has to hire more employees (or MSPs) to deal with the MSPs and all the busy work.

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It is quite a racket.