Design is always a trade off. Do you want more focus on content, or more information with less focus? Is your default setting more friendly to smaller or larger screens? Every person has different preferences, and every trade off has cost benefits you can run. Yet your statement here is very “black and white” (ahem), assuming everyone should think like you. That betrays a lack of nuance in understanding how design works.
In the programming world, you also have these trade offs, yet it’s easier to avoid thinking about them at times. Static vs dynamic languages are full of trade offs like this.
To avoid coming across as yelling at clouds, attempt to frame why it’s a trade off you prefer, rather than a platonic ideal others don’t see (because it isn’t).
It would not be the right choice for a default config, or in a context where sometimes things are scrollable and sometimes they aren’t. (This is often the case on mobile phones; if there’s no scroll bar, the only way to tell if something is scrollable is to try it, if you think to.)
Well, ok, sometimes we do, but...yeah.
and some designs come out of relentless targeting the impact of the bottom line at the expense of aesthetic or "pleasurable to use", some designs come out of snake-oil sales-people, etc etc.
Different populations, different needs/wants/desires/cultural expectations. This is what focused advertising is all about. You can create one interface and say "everyone must use and learn to love this one," and that can work well. You can also gain immediate appeal by creating "one interface for each population of potential users" and relentlessly target your designs for each of those populations. I don't think we've fully recognized it in software engineering circles, but I think a lot of what are producing today is really about creating different experiences for different populations when the core capabilities have been there, available for free or on extremely cheap computing platforms, for anyone to use, for decades.
I imagine that's fundamentally what the job of most software engineers is today: find the design that best matches the needs of the customer, and build a workflow for their needs.
I agree with your chagrin for vanishing scrollbars and hamburger menus, by the way. There ought to be a good term for designers who do the opposite of what good design does (which is make things which are usable).