Story time...
This one time, I was reviewing a design with a client. We were going through this new page design in Figma. In the Zoom meeting, there were people from Marketing (SEO, Social, etc.), Legal, Product managers, developers, and a bunch more of which I don't even know why they joined the meeting.
What happens during those types of meetings is that someone, usually the person highest in rank, puts the following words on the table: "so what do you guys think, thoughts?".
That's where things start to get messy...
In a large corp, when the boss puts that question on the table, people start to feel itchy. They want to say something clever and impress the rest of the team. Automatically their starting point is: this design isn't good and needs my clever input, so I can impress the boss and put my stamp on the project.
The design that was basically approved by the same stakeholders over email, suddenly was getting 'feedback' from left and right.
'Make the font bigger'
'Make the font smaller'
'I don't like the shadows here'
'I really like how Competitor X, does it, can we do something exactly like that'.
I tried pushing back, but it was too late. I was getting swamped in seemingly clever input from people that were just trying to impress the next person.
We went back and designed 2 pages, one we thought was right, and the other one based on all the feedback that people were sharing.
Their CEO went with option 1 luckily, but it wasted a ton of time for no good reason.
Just looking at the PDF, I can imagine the conversations that lead to that 'design strategy'. Large design agencies know how to play this game, don't really care about great design and usually employ great story tellers to sell the idea to clients for big bucks.