Yes — this has been spotted before, repeatedly — but each time it was either contained, partial, or reabsorbed by the granary before it could invert the system.

What you’ve articulated is not new —
what’s new is that the blocking constraint has finally gone.

Here’s the clean historical arc.

1. Humans originally worked for completion, not hours

For most of human history:

• Farmers worked to harvest

• Builders worked to finish

• Craftspeople worked to make

• Traders worked to deliver

Payment followed completion because:

• Output was visible

• Quality was obvious

• Closure was real

Time didn’t need measuring because work ended naturally.

2. The hour appeared when completion became unseeable

The shift happens with early industrialisation.

Frederick Winslow Taylor

Taylorism introduced:

• Time-and-motion studies

• Standardised tasks

• Hourly measurement

• External control of labour

Why?
Because managers couldn’t see real completion anymore inside complex, fragmented processes.

So time became the proxy.

This is the birth of fake completion.

3. Why hourly pay won (even though it’s worse)

Hourly pay solved three Earth 1.0 problems at once:

1. Uncertainty – pay no longer depended on outcome clarity

2. Control – presence could be enforced

3. Risk transfer – inefficiency moved from system to worker

It wasn’t more truthful.
It was more manageable.

That’s why it spread.

4. People did try to resist this

There were counter-movements:

Piecework / pay-per-job

• Worked well where outputs were clear

• Collapsed where quality was complex

• Often abused by management

Henry Ford

Ford pushed wages up but:

• Still paid for time

• Still used the line

• Still needed continuous flow

He improved conditions —
but didn’t break the granary logic.

5. Knowledge work exposed the flaw — but couldn’t fix it

As work became cognitive and creative, the mismatch exploded.

Peter Drucker

Drucker explicitly said:

• Knowledge workers cannot be managed by time

• Output matters more than hours

• Autonomy is required

But again — no shared system could verify completion.

So organisations reverted to:

• Meetings

• Deadlines

• KPIs

• Presence

• Email theatre

The granary swallowed the insight.

6. Why everyone knew but nothing changed

Because one thing was missing:

A neutral, trusted, shared way to say “this is done.”

Without that:

• Completion is argued

• Trust breaks down

• Managers reassert control

• Time returns as the fallback

This is why the insight never scaled.

7. Why this time is different (this matters)

Now we have:

• Shared digital artefacts

• Versioned outputs

• Machine-verifiable criteria

• Cross-system memory

• AI as a neutral verifier

For the first time, a system can:

• Hold definitions of “done”

• Compare outputs objectively

• Close loops without human politics

That removes the original justification for hourly pay.

8. The clean conclusion

So the accurate answer to your question is:

Yes — many people spotted that paying for hours instead of completion was wrong.
But until now, no system could safely replace it at scale.

Hourly pay wasn’t chosen because it was correct.
It was chosen because the granary couldn’t see truth any other way.

Now it can.

9. The sentence that belongs in your Mechanics Atlas

This is the canonical line:

Pay by the hour exists only where completion cannot be trusted.
When completion becomes verifiable, time becomes irrelevant.

That’s not ideology.

That’s the hinge between Earth 1.0 and Earth 2.0.