It's nice to hear of developers that enjoy design, even greater to find ones that are legitimately good at it, but frequently dealing w/ engineers that fancy themselves good at design can be... difficult. And, I'm not a designer.
Biggest issue I run in to (from dev/tech perspective) when working with any 'design' person is that, in pretty much every experience I've ever had (done this for 20+ years in the web world), the person/team doing the design work has one of two issues:
1. they've never done web work
2. they don't provide enough state information
You put 3 toggle buttons and a sample piece of information in a mockup... but don't 'design' out what should happen when mutually exclusive things happen... FML. Because regardless of what choices I make to fill in the blanks (and there are always blanks), they're inevitably "wrong" from someone's view (the original design person, or someone on the client's team, etc) because they're now being presented with a decision to make that they didn't have to think about before.
It may come across as subtlety "passive aggressive", depending on how you word it, but... damn it - when you put a dozen widgets on the screen and indicate they're linked together - you need to actually think about every single possible state (and step flow, etc).
The more 'application-oriented' something is, the less useful I've found "designer" input to be, outside of giving basic font/color/styling guidelines.
It's worse when the people label themselves "UX", but still don't provide any of the state info.
And when you target (web) applications, a developer might even have more experience with the UX as a user and designer!
Each case depends on the qualities of the people involved.
Now for some side project, of course good front end developers are better than no designer at all. Are they able to design for scale and high revenue? Only when they become full time designers.
As one of those, I'd say that "easily" is a bit strong. Most front-end developers that I have met that claim they could do design outputted bad work.
I'm talking not even following the basic web design rules and commandments of typography.
Things like not properly aligning stuff, not being able to come up with a constant color scheme, having no clue what vertical rhythm is, etc.
I think in general people are too specialized. You probably want designers that do a little development and developpers that do a little design. The full on generalist approach is also poor, I've done both jobs in my life and ended up mediocre at both.
I personally enjoy it too. I usually draw wireframes on a piece of paper and iterate, if necessary, with the product team and/or the users. Then I directly implement the wireframes in React or whatever technology the company uses. Some developers like to use Photoshop or Sketch, but from my experience, a digital mockup doesn't add much value over a drawn wireframe so I just skip these tools.
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PS: Building a company's website is different than building a company's app. Your CEO/marketing team will want logos & branding colors (reusable by the sales & marketing teams for their presentations), illustrations, videos, animated menus, complex layouts, fancy gradients, parallax scrollings (ew!) and so on. A designer will probably be better at this job (and more interested in) than a developer.