When I worked at a company that did a lot of AB testing, we had a lot of people whose main job was to interview users. This was an input in the development process. Then we tested whatever we came up with before releasing it.

I suspect there’s a disconnect here where you are talking about smaller, early stage companies. A lot of the time they don’t have the sample size to do proper AB testing, or the resources to do it properly, and they have less to lose. So shooting from the hip is more likely to be the only reasonable choice.