The author doesn't tie the two points together very well at the end, but there's definitely a case being made.
> We follow an approach called Human Centred Design, which involves ‘the human perspective in all steps of the problem-solving process’.
Based on that definition, it seems like "Human Centered Design" is just a platitude.
Genuine Human Centred Design would create and enhance communities of interest with broader and more humane motivations than corporate profit-seeking.
Unsurprisingly it's rare in corporate projects, and in small-developer projects that ape corporate attitudes.
But it does exist outside of them.
Where I disagree is the notion that design has to be one or the other. I suspect it's more like a continuum, with the worst dark patterns at one extreme, and various not-for-profit empowering and educational apps and projects at the other - the ideal HCD project being a UI/UX that models and encourages humane, "clean", mutually beneficial, and non-exploitative interactions in a way that users instantly feel comfortable with and want to use.
HCD grew out of the fact that too many products were being designed by teams that seemed to give little thought to finding out about the people who would have to use them. (It's "User Centred Design" but realising that defining people as "Users" in the title has the awkward connotation of suggesting that a person's whole purpose in life is to use your product. Or even that your product will only affect the people who actively use it - whereas there are other stakeholders in the process who might only use it indirectly.)
Literally speaking, if you were to map out the activities in HCD / UCD, you wouldn't find the user at the centre. The design team interacts with the users, sets the activities, interprets the results, communicates with the other parts of the business, etc. From a cold analytical perspective, the design team still sits at the middle of that map. But they're supposed to have the person who has to use this (and the other stakeholders - other humans) at the centre of their thinking, and a set of activities and processes that help them find out more about them through the lens of the people they interact with. They are supposed to use various kinds of interaction with users to constantly refine hypotheses about how adding the product to the mix will affect things, so that it can shape how they think about the design.
It's Human Centred in a similar way to how Problem-Based Learning is problem-based. Most learning approaches will attempt to show you a problem at some stage, so it'd be easy to say it's just a platitude. But the idea in PBL is that the problems are the "big rocks" that go into the teaching design first, and the other activities in the process are designed to support them, rather than the problems being something small peppered in at the end just to verify that the learning happened.
I tentatively agree with the sentiment. Negative consequences stemming from aversion to discomfort is a theme I've been noticing a lot in my personal life.