I think this statement is just about as true for design as it is for development.
That's not to say developers don't make choices sacrificing utility for sales - they do, and I bitch about this here plenty (for instance: bloat, invasive telemetry, privacy-hostile solutions, addiction-generating mechanics). But it doesn't look like a trend that's essentially consumed the discipline.
I don't think this is true. Many undesirable qualities in modern design are due to a cult like belief in them by designers rather than just listening to users. Excessive use of white space in virtually all design being the most obvious one.
That's not generally because it boosts sales. It's because they've really drunk the kool aid that it's better.
IIRC, negative space is one of those things that lay users tend to think is unimportant or even undesirable as a design element, but every empirical study of usability/reasability shows that it is important, and that lacking it produces negative reaction to the end product even if users don't attribute the reaction to the missing negative space, and that this result has held up with online design but was well-known even in older studies of print design.
(This is not an invented example; when I was building a PC recently, I wrote userstyles to remove most of the negative space in UI of a shop I was buying parts from, just to not be driven to madness when trying to compare prices and features among available components.)
It's not about skills, it's about goals.
There are roughly two main conflicting goals when building a product. One, make a product that delivers value to users. Two, make money off that product. In a perfect world, these two would be maximized simultaneously - leading to fair exchange of value between the customer and the provider. In the real world, people sacrifice the first in order to get more of the second.
UI/UX design as it is today is almost entirely about sacrificing utility to boost sales. All the trends parent commenters are complaining about exist to convince users to spend money by means other than delivering a useful product to them - be it by differentiation from others, by looking like popular players, by reducing functionality to make it look simpler when purchasing decision is made. Addiction-inducing design trends like timelines and notifications and loot boxes are a part of this too.
This is not failure of intelligence of individuals, this is a moral failure of the industry. And being on receiving end, as a software user, it's fucking annoying. So is being upstream from it, as a software developer doing their best to deliver value to user, only to see it shat upon because the organization adopts user-hostile design trends.