Nope. Never really happened for me. Admittedly I don't solely work on frontend. But 22 years of making user facing interfaces and I really don't feel more confident about it than I did on day one.
You might enjoy "Refactoring UI", which I find to be a good design reference (with lots of specific tactics and examples) for front-end developers. It takes a lot of mystery out of the design process.
I actually consider it part of a front-end developer's job to push back against designs that don't work. There are anti-patterns for users and many of them make life harder for developers (modals launching modals, for example). Some examples from my own life is a designer adding so many columns to a table that it would be too crunched on laptop screens, magic interactions that break a11y, or flows that just don't make sense for seasoned web users. Now that's not to say I can design a great UI on my own, but plenty of good editors can't write a hit novel either.
Most of the time designers are happy for the feedback, because it's cheaper to fix things early on and ultimately makes them look better.
You don't have to be a designer to spot the good and the bad, and I'd be willing to guess you've osmosed more than you give yourself credit for.