Agreed. I also think the collaboration, pitching, review bits have been heavily design theater for awhile. I'm not saying it was the designer carrying on the charade, but the product team generally. Those steps all really happen only for the final implementation to be a frankensteined fraction of what was discussed. I'm not saying anything remotely like we should be more respectful of the designer's effort, I'm saying there's so much wasted and unused design work. I'm saying you could cut that out of the process and you'd get a very similar end result. That end result might be bad (perhaps it would help to be more respectful of the designer's efforts), but it's the same either way.

The requirements are so unstable—the product team has few strong beliefs—that they change the next day. And then again every few days after. Hopefully, the changes are small enough that design isn't full resetting each time, but it's not rare to have big changes. The entire project gets swapped not infrequently. What eventually slows the changes is the engineering deadline and the fact that the developers need to start. But the slow drip of product requirements means whatever time budgeting went to design shrinks. And whatever time went to engineering is eaten into such that now the design needs to be something that can be built in half the original amount of dev time. Each day the designer takes at this point eats into that window and so it's dictated by what can get built.

I don't think that has to strictly be viewed like an entirely bad outcome, but for what it is and how it's accomplished, you could just cut the design part out. Besides, you're going to iterate later, right? Right?