Agreed. That is one useless designer. When I hired designers I would only hire people who could write front-end code as well as they designed.
I've did both: having a design than translation to HTML and people that could do both
There's an advantage to someone that will focus only on the design and another that will focus on only translating that to HTML/CSS/JS namely, that someone that can do both very well is rare
But of course, if they can do the design and a basic html/css of it usually can move the project faster. You will not have the greatest design or greatest html/css but it will usually arrive at a good solution