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Notes -
Generally agree, but with a bit of a branching split.
The suit.
Suits were originally for men conducting business to meet each other in a way to demonstrate the exact kind of respect that you and OP discuss. I like those kind of suits.
Suits, today, in companies that require them or strongly suggest them, are far more about a corporate conformity and "putting on airs" of Doing Big Business. I spent three years wearing a suit everyday to my job as a .... data scientist. I was rarely in meetings with non-technical staff. I made zero "deals". I was slightly uncomfortable all day long and I paid thousands of dollars in dry cleaning.
The suit, in that context, is functionally pointless and is a kind of weird aspirational gesture to a form of business that 90%+ of non-sales professionals really will never engage in.
What I'm saying here is that blindly aping the forms of respect (dress, appearance, etc.) can, if done without intent, actually create a kind of personal disrespect. The "corporate soulness drone" meme is, in part, a nod to the fact that trying to blend together old world savoir-faire with post-ww2 industrial capitalism fails in a non-linear way; there's no charm of a classic British firm and the efficiency of Space Age MegaCompanies gets slowed down and neutered. You get InnaTech instead of Lloyd's and instead of SpaceX.
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