I think we should give the GP the benefit of the doubt and assume he's talking about not pulling work that he thinks is for an NPC. Presumably if he gets stuck with work for an NPC he'll do it.
Where I work, this routine stuff is handled by an ops team. But we have a saying that ops will have a different job scope every 6 months because it will be automated. The ops team gets plenty of respect and are probably the real PCs.
However phrasing it as PC/NPC work does seem insulting. Even games are evolving into forms where everyone is the PC. To mess with the analogy even more, it's usually low level PCs that are tasked with rat hunting and fetch quests.
I’m not trying to achieve zen. If I was I’d advise quitting tech, and going to a monastery.
Becoming a zen master is definitely a PC move. It’s just not mine (or isn’t currently, losing all my stuff and sleeping on a sleeping bag definitely raised my awareness of how irrelevant stuff is)
Teams generally like me, I’m always pushing boundaries and always willing to provide paperwork for them to CYA and blame it on me should it blow up.
I mean, I kind of get it, but I also believe that there's a sense of zen humility in, say, doing the dishes.