> The thing the author doesn't seem to realize / acknowledge is that UI/UX design is about balancing enormous numbers of competing constraints and concerns. It's a human problem, and like most problems of this genre there is no "best" answer, only different sets of weights for different, often competing, concerns.

To underline this point, I think in general design suffers from a lot of bikeshedding at tech companies. There are likely many designs tucked away in discarded files that addressed this specific pain point, too, but were discarded at the request of some PM, or manager, or director. Then there's the process of user testing and experiment design that is used to validate UI/UX of products like this. This design may have actually tested well even if it wasn't the team's favorite... I've worked places where that data is used to override a designer's opinion.

Now apart from all that of course, Occam's razor probably applies as well I guess... perhaps this bit of UI was just poorly designed. But I see a lot of chatter on HN regularly about design being superfluous, subversive, unintuitive, "bad" when really I think many (most?) designers are unhappy with the designs that ship out as well.