Looking at tech, designers have held very little power historically. Examples are few and far between, with Apple being the most notable outlier. Old Apple did not change the status quo much - it was a golden child for less than a decade after all - the 80s and 90s saw very little tech companies where designers were calling the shots. Only when New Apple rose from the ashes did tech start to deeply prioritize value design. Nowadays, many startups have design cofounders, major companies like Airbnb or Dropbox regularly and prominently show the influence of their design teams, and so on.
It definitely feels like an overcorrection right now - many designers will surely be amongst the first to go in the next recession.
(As far as fields other than tech, they’re all completely different stories regarding their relationship to visual design)
Look back in the history of most major brands, icons and trademarks and the ones that most people would consider classic all seem to come from two or three distinct eras.
The rest can be viewed as "what the hell were they thinking/smoking?", cargo culting the current fashion and much jumping on bandwagons.