The way to reduce work is by subsidiarity - devolve decision making to the lowest possible level.
Unfortunately this is not possible. Subsidiairity means the active (if necessary) respect of the duties of others to their own constituents. In this case a WG Chair's constituents are not the members of his group (as you seem to imply). The constituents of all the members of every WG are the users and the system these users trust. This is because this is the Charter of the IETF.
Subsidiarity to apply in this case would call for all the IETF Members to share the same vision of the Internet - this could result from a common model of the network - what is not the case (or there would be no problem). The network model is replaced by the non documented vision of the AD and IESG Members.
This explains why IETF is better suited to maintain systems (as everyone can observe them and get a similar understanding) rather then innovating or creating. Innovation is delegated to IAB or considered as a long range issue for the IRTF.
jfc
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