I recognise the waste in waiting time, but I also think we are still increasing productivity more than enough to make up for it.
Personally I solve it by multitasking harder. Whenever there is a waiting time for a download or other stuff I simply start doing something else. I'm not going to waste my life watching loading bars for a living.
I don't think increasing user-friendlyness is a good solution. It's pretty much what caused the issues to begin with. Every time Windows or the apps make something more user-friendly it always results in more buttons to click and more updates to keep up.
I also spend an unreasonable amount of time just rearranging the windows in comparison to back when apps had keyboard-only GUIs with functions layered in different pages or tabs. I obviously don't think that is a good solution today either, but it goes to show that the bloated operating system has a lot of the blame.
Say you want to do something simple like renaming a file, you'll need to open an app to show the folders and files and also 100 different functions that are of no use for the specific task, position and scroll it where it's visible, navigate by mouse or keyboard and then do whatever you wanted. My point is that just operating the operation system is something that requires 10s of seconds over and over again every day. There's a long way from thought to execution for the simplest task.
The good thing is that it enables a lot of people to do so without any training at all, so maybe that makes up for it in total.