> 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.

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.

That's still just "looks prettier". Yes, there is a degree at which the design is so ugly it interferes with its intended function, but we've taken the opposite up to 11. Negative space in modern design constantly interferes with intended function. Take a listing on an on-line store. A design making copious use of negative space may look stunningly beautiful, but a design that just follows the Gestalt principles but otherwise crams in 5x the number of items on a screen will make it easier for the user to choose the right item to buy, and will consume less of their time.

(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.)