Also, just to nitpick - Apple has produced some of the worst products with no understanding of what the user wants - for e.g. Apple Music App. Also, Google, a recent one - Google Meet hides its mute/unmute button and in a completely undiscoverable way. Imagine driving a car where the brake pedal disappears only to appear when you hover your arm in a particular position left of the steering wheel. Now you can apply brakes. That's what they're doing with Google Meet, when I want to unmute to say something, I have to hover my mouse on the bottom of the screen and the unmute button pops up. Why isn't it always visible!? If I were leading that project, I would ask the team to scratch the entire UI and rebuild it and make sure these things don't happen again.
Microsoft Teams does the same thing, only with the entire toolbar, not just a single button.
The IDEO philosophy – which has really influenced a lot of Silicon Valley's best teams – is all about what you're saying. Design Thinking is really about making everyone on the team a designer. Everyone has their speciality, but the Designer's role is to bring everyone together with a process that involves everyone.
This was the approach used by Apple when they first launched their Apple Stores, twenty years ago. Rather than impose a design created in a vacuum, they brought together a diverse team that included someone representing the retail employee perspective.