We all hated the urgency messaging internally. Hated it. We felt bad. Many of us were reasonably proud of our product and felt this tarnished our ability to deliver value to customers. We argued with the product org and the CPO on a regular basis.
The reality is that the urgency messaging drove significant incremental business that they felt they could not afford to pass up. The logic that the CPO applied at the time was some pretty sporty mental gymnastics: "we optimize for conversion (looker to booker) because that's a proxy to actually delivering value to the customer." The idea was that if a customer books and stays, it means they found what they were looking for. Being stuck in a perpetual, frustrating decision paralysis sucks after all. While I didn't agree with that framing, it's a touch less preposterous than it sounds. At the time, almost all bookings were fully refundable. So if you booked and stayed (you could have cancelled any time before the day at no cost, for most bookings), there's indeed something that went sort of right. Of course we also tried to measure CSAT in a number of ways (like net promoter scores) but those measurements are tricky at best.
In any case, one of the counter proposals, which I tried to co-champion unsuccessfully, was to add a checkbox to the account area to opt out of urgent messaging. The idea was that if you were annoyed enough by them to find that flag (or to be told where to find it) then surely it would also be better for the company to give you that and retain you as a customer? It was IIRC never tried. I was sad. It would've been a tricky to measure experiment, that would have had to be run for a long time. Loyalty measurement is hard.