The structure of the team gets reproduced in the product. Read "The soul of a new machine" for a great example.
There is an unhealthy elitest hierarchy at many companies which manifests itself as interfaces to users on the assumption they're totally incompetent. It's a reproduction of an insular culture.
The worst part is that it's reinforcing. The thing you've probably heard of is the Stanford prison study but there's many similar ones; essentially you set up a context for how you engage with your customer and the customer plays the roles dictated by the context.
So you treat users like idiots and then they start acting like idiots. It really does work that way.
Let me give an intuitive analogy for those unconvinced. We're going to use a gym, library, and bar. The same person would be exercising, studying, and drinking at those institutions, in specifically that order.
We shape the buildings (create the context); thereafter they shape us.
The core problem of UX is the extreme focus of what kind of user they want as opposed to what kind of context they want to facilitate. The latter is how sustainability, growth, and value happen.
It's the difference between say assuming your customers are alcoholics and then building a bar and saying "it is of public benefit, profitable to our company, whatever, if our users studied so let us make a library and they will rise to the occasion".
So long as it is within reason, this is possible. People will do difficult things of value (such as a gym) if you're willing to adequately facilitate it. We don't need to limit ourselves to a fast food internet. See the project known as wikipedia for an example.
Around the time I started becoming aware of this, I once brought up in a meeting that I thought we should support keyboard shortcuts for users who prefer keyboard interaction. You would have thought I had desecrated a religious symbol.
I did figure out a hack though. The next time we met I pretended like the previous conversation had never happened, and instead brought up that for a11y we really needed keyboard shortcuts :-D They had no choice but to agree because prioritizing a11y is another religious tenet. I love a good win-win/two birds/etc.
If my app (or whatever) just include what I think is good because users are idiots and I know better than them, then, my app will only attract idiotic users (or attract smart ones, but they'll behave like the idiot one)?
Using the parent example, if I'm an idiot user (or one behaving like that) I wouldn't want a slider that allows me to select the range I want, but I would want a specific button labeled 10-12? Or I wouldn't even want one, because the app creators know better than me?
And in the last paragraph, it's about letting users go on a journey from novice to expert using your app if they want? Like using a tooltip on an icon showing how to the same using a keyboard shortcut.
If only I had infinite time, energy and money; the things I'd do...
The question is what if you take that and press the play button for 25 years. You get the nth order derivative; a mix of amplification of the tangible and a dampening of the aspirational under a constantly churning framework of the ideological.
Or to put it in less academic and more literary terms, the reality must die and the dream cannot be born and in this interregnum, a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.
We, like all generations are tasked with building our grandparents dreams and our grandchildrens future. That's the kind of orientation I think we need more of to drive how we choose to use our time.
Because that time is right now
This, absolutely this! I recently had to use a web app whose date filtering consisted of nothing but "1 day ago; 1 week ago; 1 month ago; older than 6 months" when I was looking for a record that I knew was in March of 2018. It frustrated me enough to make me exclaim out loud an unabbreviated WTF!? A peek at the API calls it was making showed those options hardcoded directly into the "filter" parameter, so I couldn't just inject my own custom date range --- something which I have done before with success.
I wrote a short script to scrape the (paginated, infinite-scrolling style) API and filter the tens of thousands of records myself, and almost half an hour later of waiting for those records to come back, found the one I was looking for. Doing that filtering on the backend DB would've probably been nearly trivial, and all the UI needed would be two date pickers (a long-solved problem), but because of that idiotic design choice, I wasted both their and my resources.
Sometimes I feel a lot of modern software has authoritarian tendencies
It's not just software, but you're right. I've referred to "modern design" trends as "authoritarian minimalism" too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30018763