UI/UX is designed by UI/UX specialists at giant corporations. Often engineers who have criticism get brushed off.
If engineer keeps pushing back, it is bad performance review and "hard to work with".
A lot of it is trying to make it look visually and superficially impressive trying to apply the common hammers like whitespace, very little visible content at once as to not "overwhelm" the user and other rules to anything, and then trying to pretend whatever that is going to increase the sales by doing non-sensical user research, only listening to what proves their initial vision and then later trying to cherry-pick success metrics.
A/B test the new Settings panel:
If User spends more time in the Settings page -> We just increased engagement. They must really like the new Settings page and find that pleasurable to use. That's a win.
User spends less time in the Settings page -> We made it quicker to find and tweak the correct settings. That's amazing.
Either way, any change you make you can find wins. You could even keep going back and forth between two versions.
Also another common flaw I notice with some redesigns or things in general is that when the features, e.g. config settings were initially released, there was very thorough understanding and need for that feature and whoever put it there knew the technical implications and why it is needed, and they put it there in such a way that it's reasonably easy to use and makes sense with other things.
However when redesigning, you are going to be exposed to all those features and nuances at once. And you won't have a good understanding of everything at all and all the little details and implications. And you might want to start with some sort of feel, framework and design to handle all of that. But then you are going to approach those features from an aspect where you have to take the features and make them adapt to the design as opposed to considering what makes sense specifically for that feature. And you won't have good understanding of the features, so either you are reducing the scope a lot or also just implement features incorrectly or in a poor way, not working well together with some other features, etc.
You might be into something though.
Or at least leadership definitely and obviously wants it, but product and design under leadership wants to just convince leadership that it's going to do that. But frequently it isn't or it's very difficult to analyze that data and it's easy to cherry pick flawed metrics retroactively to try to convince leadership that it actually did some improvements. It's difficult to question and verify any sort of metrics without launching a whole investigation into it yourself, which rarely someone would have an incentive to do so.
It could be that at your workplace maybe these things actually do improve KPIs and sales, I would actually be more happy with that compared to if there are meaningless changes or changes that make things worse that don't improve sales at all.
What's really needed is internal pushback against UI changes without user studies to back them up as well as a willingness to listen to user complaints and not just brush them off as "people complain no matter what change is make hurdurdur". Perhaps also an understanding that even neutral changes (as far as usability is concerned) have a negative cost to users.