At a high level, there’s good utility in guiding users down the path of a curated experience when the designers know the weak points of the app, or where some given tool has much more general utility than another (in which case they might hide the other tool under a context menu or something).

It’s not necessarily the case that designers guide users down paths that solely benefit the designer, and I think that approach tends to be seen by most as “bad design”. In fact, it might even be bad design by definition.

You can frame it any way you want, but you are manipulating them TO bring utility.

You are making a choice, on their behalf, that influences how they experience something without their knowledge or explicit consent. Just because you might intend them only the best, doesn't change that it is a form of unseen manipulation.

What you describe as utility is manipulating people, in a sense. You won't design a push door with handles implying it be pulled instead, so in a way, you're manipulating a user's action to push the door. I think you're assuming that manipulating people is used pejoratively, when I'm using it to mean "handle or control (a tool, mechanism, etc.), typically in a skillful manner," rather than "control or influence (a person or situation) cleverly, unfairly, or unscrupulously."

When someone sits down to use an app, the app will have higher utility if it makes whatever task they're aiming to do, easier to do. When designing an app's UI, making something easy for users is a matter of understanding what their expectations are and matching what they look for by default when they try to do a thing in your app with what you show them in the UI. That the thing they look for is the thing you show them is both the manipulation and the thing that raises the utility.