You might be into something though.
Or at least leadership definitely and obviously wants it, but product and design under leadership wants to just convince leadership that it's going to do that. But frequently it isn't or it's very difficult to analyze that data and it's easy to cherry pick flawed metrics retroactively to try to convince leadership that it actually did some improvements. It's difficult to question and verify any sort of metrics without launching a whole investigation into it yourself, which rarely someone would have an incentive to do so.
It could be that at your workplace maybe these things actually do improve KPIs and sales, I would actually be more happy with that compared to if there are meaningless changes or changes that make things worse that don't improve sales at all.
A lot of it is trying to make it look visually and superficially impressive trying to apply the common hammers like whitespace, very little visible content at once as to not "overwhelm" the user and other rules to anything, and then trying to pretend whatever that is going to increase the sales by doing non-sensical user research, only listening to what proves their initial vision and then later trying to cherry-pick success metrics.
A/B test the new Settings panel:
If User spends more time in the Settings page -> We just increased engagement. They must really like the new Settings page and find that pleasurable to use. That's a win.
User spends less time in the Settings page -> We made it quicker to find and tweak the correct settings. That's amazing.
Either way, any change you make you can find wins. You could even keep going back and forth between two versions.