> There are dedicated UX teams whose sole focus is to improve UX.

Imho, this is a big source of the problem.

Granted: there are some amazing UX designers and teams out there.

But my experience with UX teams has been that in most middle-market companies they're usually less that sort and more the {huge designer ego} + {management consulting political skillset} one.

And it's a tough problem to solve! Because ultimately you want someone who can argue very hard for their approach to improving UX (usually against opposition from others). But when someone's ego exceeds their skill, that leads to disaster.

And without a strong Jobs-esque "this sucks" arbiter over them, their changes make it to prod.

The builder vs maintainer mindset probably plays a role too.

Mature products need the maintainer mindset a lot more than the builder mindset.

It's hard enough to find devs who are good at maintainer-mode. I think it's even harder with other roles.