I wonder how much of this is driven by misunderstanding the analytics?
“We have a huge drop-off rate in our checkout flow! Customers have intent to buy and they’re somehow getting blocked in checkout; we need a smoother/faster checkout…”
No dumbass, you need to need to not charge $15 shipping on a product where you’re only $5 cheaper than your free shipping competitor.
Usually this is due to having to type in all my data just to figure out what shipping options are, but I'm quite sure every step you make people do to check out results in x% fewer sales.