All else being equal, What is the value of job creation?
You are correct that creating jobs in themselves, generally speaking does not have any economic value (save some exceptional situations - see below). In fact this is not novel observation, and you will find this stated in any 101 economic textbook for example see Mankiw Principles of Economics 8ed pp 33. As written in the textbook (in an excerpt from Economics article):

Little in the literature seems more relevant to
contemporary economic debates than what usually is called the broken window fallacy. Whenever a government program is justified not on its merits but by the jobs it will create, remember the broken window: Some teenagers, being the little
beasts that they are, toss a brick through a bakery window. A crowd gathers and laments, “What a shame.” But before you know it, someone suggests a silver lining to the situation: Now the baker will have to spend money to have the window repaired. This will add to the income of the
repairman, who will spend his additional income,
which will add to another seller’s income, and so
on. You know the drill. The chain of spending will
multiply and generate higher income and employment. If the broken window is large enough, it
might produce an economic boom! . . .


Most voters fall for the broken window fallacy,
but not economics majors. They will say, “Hey,
wait a minute!” If the baker hadn’t spent his
money on window repair, he would have spent it
on the new suit he was saving to buy. Then the
tailor would have the new income to spend, and
so on. The broken window didn’t create net new
spending; it just diverted spending from somewhere else. The broken window does not create
new activity, just different activity. People see the
activity that takes place. They don’t see the activity that would have taken place.
The broken window fallacy is perpetuated in
many forms. Whenever job creation or retention
is the primary objective I call it the job-counting fallacy. Economics majors understand the
non-intuitive reality that real progress comes
from job destruction. It once took 90 percent of
our population to grow our food. Now it takes 3
percent. Pardon me, Willie, but are we worse off
because of the job losses in agriculture? The
would-have-been farmers are now college professors and computer gurus. . . .
So instead of counting jobs, we should make
every job count

The above being said there is some value to creating/preserving jobs in some situations. For example, during recessions some public works program might be part of a mix that is intended to stimulate the economy, or during short but severe unpredictable crises such as the current Covid-19 situation.
For example, the Furlough/Kurzarbeit schemes  are generally considered by conventional economists  to be valuable as they can help boost aggregate demand and prevent even more severe recession (Giupponi &amp; Landais; 2020),however such support is exceptional.