I agree. It's not a "scam" necessarily, depending on your employer. I know I've had employers in the past who genuinely only cared about what you produced, not the hours you worked. You could take a week of vacation every month, but as long as you're still providing adequate value, you'll still be promoted. But then I've also been at employers (not for very long, because I won't stick around) where they value your time sitting at your desk more than anything else.

Most shitty employers in modern times are the latter. The reality is that most employees today are actually worthless and don't provide any real value, so the only metric that can really be used to who gets promoted and who doesn't is who has the most seat time. Moreover, seat time is one of the only truly objective things, which makes HR happy as their only priority (besides ulterior motives to further personal bias) is to prevent employment lawsuits. It's actually very hard to objectively measure an employee's value/performance in a way that is easily explained to HR (and thus to a judge or jury). You can't go by lines of code written. You can't go by how optimized a given piece of code is. There is so much more nuance to it.

With all of that said, start your own business. You'll still have only an illusion of true freedom, possibly even more so, but you're that much closer. If you start a business, you'll quickly find that you're at the mercy of Amazon, or your website host, or your government, or someone else. Ultimately, it is very difficult, if not impossible, to be truly free.