That being said, designers work with customers and as a former freelance designer I can tell you that wrangling the customer is basically half the job. This is true even in a company setting.
Design is one of those fields where everybody thinks they know what works and everybody thinks they have taste (spoiler alert: they don't). I ultimately stopped working in the field because you literally had to manipulate customers into making okay choices instead of horrible ones and even then you had the occasional CEO just overriding weeks of work with some bullshit idea he had on the shitter.
Everybody blames designers, but designers rarely make the choices that lead to the results everybody sees. Designers just try to get paid.
The designer described how every time they had to show a draft for a stakeholder such as a client or manager, they polished their design and then added some obvious design flaw like making something clearly off-center that should have been centered or similar. Then when they show their initial design, the manager says "Looks good but make that thing centered properly".
If the design had been flawless, the manager would find something else to object to, which would invariably make the design worse. So showing off the imperfect design leads to the perfect outcome: the manager or customer gets to feel like they contributed to the design but the design stays the way the designer intended.
[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0062759/trivia?item=tr1788197
More broadly, it's just political management of assemblies. Most governments do the same with controversial legislation: attach some wildly-outrageous clause to something slightly-less-outrageous, focus opposition on that, then strike it out. You then have the space to pass the bulk of it, which was your real objective all along, while claiming you "listened".
Having said that, at no point do I really believe the role isn't involved in decisions like hiding the randomize button in iphone music player.
It's akin to that office that has no desk because it would ruin the aesthetics. The desk has to be there, your challenge is (should be) to design around the functional requirements.