All the time, when those artists have outside investors who are investing to make a profit off of their work. It's a recurring theme in pretty much every music documentary I've watched. Accessibility is frequently at odds with artistic development. At some point, people just want you to crank out the same boring (widgets/songs/art/software) that you've done a million times, and do it cheaply.
Indie rock artists who are just playing in bars to their friends don't have that economic pressure, and you're always welcome to build your own software for your friends along with maybe a few hardcore enthusiasts.
I don't think it's as simple as "indie artists" and "artists with investors". There's room for innovation while making profit, and there's room to make catchy songs when you're an indie artist. In software, there seems to be a large divide between hobbyist code and industrial software. How many folks really write software for themselves and friends? I'd love to see a world where people grow up tinkering with software, so they can have an informed stake as a user instead of being a blind consumer.
Prioritizing commercial gain over intellectual and creative stimulation and enrichment is, on that note, one of the biggest issues I have with the modern music industry. My views don't change much if you replace "music" with "film" or "television" or "journalism" or, to the point, "hardware" or "software".
I think "users" is a stretch here. Having worked at a couple $MEGACORPs and Unicorns, the bar for a feature being successful is very low. Most of the time, features are driven by Product Managers on product teams that come up with ideas. Validation of the success of these ideas (unless they are highly visible and core to the business), in my experience has been minimal (was there a regression? no, then great!), and don't even get me started on the numerous methodological issues.
> We're building stuff for people, not other geeks
I think computing is unique in how much we (the royal "we" here, and I have nothing more than anecdata to back these observations up, so take them with a grain of salt) focus on trying to hide the internals, almost as if it stems from an embarrassment with what computing is, as something only for "geeks". How often do you hear of musicians receiving censure for not making music that "other people" listen to, or artists receiving criticism for art that "regular people" consume? Obviously, business needs necessitate a tradeoff between beauty and functionality in any field, but despite the ubiquity of tech, it feels to be one that is uniquely embarrassed by the art and technique behind it. Maybe this is just an outgrowth of the "nerds are weird" culture of the '80s and '90s?
I think the reason that users put up with such bad software is twofold:
1. Computing is new, and the general population doesn't really understand what it means to be good at it yet. The general population has enough education with things like woodwork to understand what a shoddy table is, but not yet what shoddy software is. That said, I know several non-technical users that prefer using the iOS ecosystem because it has lower perceived input latency and higher perceived stability (much like the OP of the article), so users are certainly not blind to the problems of software.
2. Software as a field is deeply embarrassed about its technical internals. The fact of the matter is, we don't need to be worried about "our grandparents" being able to use our software anymore; the vast majority of young folk in industrialized countries have spent their whole lives growing up using technology. Yet, we are still obsessed with the creation of a dichotomy between "graybeards" and "normal people", or "geeks" and "average users". We need to stop treating users as these opposed forces, hidden from the innards of the technical beast, and instead embrace them as part of what it means to create a successful product.