I think the reality is that most people who originally got into design did so not because they were passionate about user experience, but because they had some artistic sensibility, and design was a field that would let them utilise that sensitivity for aesthetics while also paying them a salary.
Over the past five years or so, the landscape has changed considerably, and many designers have been forced to make a decision to either head down a more UX-oriented path or do something else entirely. The result of this is that we now have a lot of UX designers who never really wanted to do UX, but were forced to adapt and take on a new role due to a changing industry.
Back when I was doing iOS development for a bit I had one designer forcing us to go through every single screen and manually override the default vertical font spacing and kerning settings away from the (company wide) framework we were using -- a change that was fairly trivial on Android but a pain on our iOS stack -- and this ended up taking hours that could have been spent on functionality. And made the app harder to maintain, on top of that. But this was really important to this person that the font spacing match their preference, and also be identical to Android's.
I miss simple wire frames. Some of the more productive projects I was on when doing front end work were done like this: product manager / designer gives a rough idea of layout and flow; developer works with them to throw together the simple flow as just raw HTML, really. Iterate, change, modify based on what does or doesn't work. Then the lipstick came later, once that's all nailed down. Less time wasted.
For my own sanity I've avoided front end work at all now, and have been doing systems level work instead.