There are lots of issues with UX as a field right now, but there's zero question in my mind this is the biggest one. There are incentives that are to some degree not aligned with the interests of users.
It doesn't even end at the profit interests of business owners -- career development is another one. UX workers in the field have incentives to demonstrate currency in design fashions (whether or not those fashions work well with a given application or problem domain), and the more changes you can stake a claim to, the more credit you can take.
There isn't a solution to this. The one mitigating factor is that there are limits to how badly you can misalign user incentives before many decide to go elsewhere (though there's also such a thing as monopoly power and other forms of captive audience, and there's a long tail of users who are sticky even when they technically have the ability to go elsewhere).
It doesn't even end at the profit interests of business owners -- career development is another one. UX workers in the field have incentives to demonstrate currency in design fashions (whether or not those fashions work well with a given application or problem domain), and the more changes you can stake a claim to, the more credit you can take.
There isn't a solution to this. The one mitigating factor is that there are limits to how badly you can misalign user incentives before many decide to go elsewhere (though there's also such a thing as monopoly power and other forms of captive audience, and there's a long tail of users who are sticky even when they technically have the ability to go elsewhere).