Personally I find UML (in its full, standardised form) is still a lot more complicated than is normally necessary too, but it does include versions of several useful ideas.

I have often seen a group of developers discussing something and then someone sketches a simple diagram showing entities and relationships, transitions of a finite state machine, or message-passing similar to what UML would call a sequence or communication diagram.

However, in my entire career, I have never seen anyone actually draw out fully annotated UML diagrams using the official notation, nor any instance of some of the numerous diagram types UML specifies. And that includes working at places where everyone had been given UML training!

I've seen a number of organisations where everybody has been given UML training, and mandated to use a specific UML tool. In reality though, everybody is just abusing UML class diagrams as a way to draw ad hoc "boxes and lines" diagrams instead! :-)

UML in its full, standardized form is an anti-pattern. There are many useful things in it though. Sequence and activity diagrams, for example.