(I’ll spare us all the Pareto 80%/20% theory here, although I am pretty sure that it applies here.)
The upside is that open source or free software features fewer (and often no) antipatterns modern proprietary software suffers from.
Attempts at making software more approachable are accused of dumbing down or prioritising form over function. There’s an attitude that it’s not ‘real work’ if you don’t have to memorise tonnes of inscrutable commands or spend ages tinkering with config files.
So IMO a dude that read some UX book is not entitled to "know better" what actual users need, especially people that do UX design for an app that they don't even use , so they apply dogmatic principles , remove features that were added because users asked for them( this happened at my work in the past too, designrers removed stuff , stuff that users asked for and developers spent a lot of effort to implement it , ex deleting more items at a time, because they think that repeting same 3 click operation over and over again is enoug.
UX should be done by competent people that actually used the programs or even better that test their designs with actual users.