On the contrary, the best products are typically built by the users of the products. If you are building a product you don't use, it will be worse than if you used it.
Users should be everywhere, in and out of engineering.
There are many leaders that use information as a tool that serves their own needs.
They may have the context, but they are either too focused on their own job to share it, or actively manage dissemination so they can manipulate the organization.
In my experience, this is the typical operating mode, though I do not think it is sinister or malicious - just natural.
The whole point of micro-services is to manage dependencies independently across service boundaries, using the API as the contract, not the internal libraries.
Then you can implement a service in Java, Python, Rust, C++, etc, and it doesn't matter.
Coupling your postgres db to your elasticsearch cluster via a hard library dependency impossibly heavy. The same insight applies to your bespoke services.
In practice, working in small and medium organizations, I have met very few UX designers. Instead I have met plenty of graphical designers that know almost nothing about UX design. I've been at places where I - as a backend developer - know more about practical UX design than anyone on the design team.
I think the reason why we have "bad mobile first design with awful desktop UX" is because very few of the people designing these experiences are UX designers.
I was surprised the article didn't highlight the horror show that is Vector22 at Wikipedia, a design so colossally bad that after three years of suck costs the only path to saving face was to make it the default theme for all users: "Mission Accomplished!"
This ignores the current tend of hosted gaming services. The pendulum regularly swings back and forth between thin and fat clients as cost and innovation evolve.