I've found the users-first mentality degrading over the years at companies. It's a bit jarring too, since a lot of my early training was pretty user-centric.

I do have a feeling that the example of bigger players is carefully followed by many of the other companies, kind of as a cult of success. And that example for a long time has been rather lacking.

This is definitely true. In growth companies there is way more emphasis these days on investor hype over user centricity.

For companies that have a solid competitive moat they have at best gotten lazy about user centricity and at worst actively hostile.