As a product design lead, your comment and the comment you’re replying to reflect my experiences both with open source and with commercial development. For me, part of the solution has been learning how to communicate with developers. I’ve also found it helpful to broaden the scope of UX I consider to include the developer experience, data processing workflows, and the design of CLI and API interfaces.
Sometimes making software more user-friendly may even cause the code to get more "ugly", because instead of a nice and elegant piece of software that only solves the core problem, you now have to deal with all the weirdnesses of how people perceive the problem as well. Taking away complexity on the user's side almost always adds complexity to the code. And if you're the developer, it's very easy to think that the tool you created is perfectly usable, because you understand everything about the mental model that went into it.