How about people (designers) start thinking about their users and some some strict adherence to someone else's opinion about Material Design. I hope we see Material Design like we see touch screens in vehicles. An embarrassing mistake at best and potentially fatal at worst.

Design should always serve the user. If it doesn't, it needs to go away.

The number of designers who will march up to their VP and boldly declare that all the company's apps are just fine and don't need any kind of redesigning is small.

You get a similar thing any time a development team runs out of feature work or actual stress points in an application they maintain. They wind up reworking the thing mainly to have something to do to justify the continued paychecks until the business thinks of an actual reason.

Granted, the developer side of the story might happen as well but I'm guessing not that much (all the dev teams I've worked in saw an overloaded pipeline of work so it is very hard for me to imagine otherwise)

We used to achieve this balance with a manual.

A printed manual. Not a URL printed in 3 point Helvetica in light gray on a white background on a tiny leaflet in amongst a dozen similar-looking regulatory leaflets that will all go into the recycling bin when the new shiny shows up.

Although, you probably still need to print a leaflet with updates between when you sent the manual out and when you finalized the software.