I'd say it isn't: as a developer, you are continuously making decisions that affect the user. The better you understand the user, the better your decisions will be.
It's a game of telephone, the fewer intermediaries the better.
That makes the assumption that the two people on the line can speak the same “language”.
No, it makes the assumption that given inevitable loss of information between any two nodes, the fewer edges the better.
I’ll remember that the next time I am on a telephone with someone who doesn’t speak my language or I their language…that there will be a minimal loss of information being passed between us.
At a recent job, product actively intervened with dev trying to talk to users