Earlier quoted context omitted.
>People aren't idiots. They don't do this work for no reason. Citation absolutely needed. In my experience people are frequently idiots, and work gets done for no reason after someone with authority is convinced that it's a good idea by someone aching to do that sort of work. If it happens in so many other cases, it does happen in UI/UX as well.
I'll concede "most people are of average idiocy" and cite core principles of statistics and the meanings of average and most. But yes, you're right, happens all the time. Less so with most of the large scale more popular redesigns people tend to think of when writing articles like this about tools they actually use; the team at Atlassian, for example, is not made of idiots, neither at Slack, Google, Twitter, or other…
But on the notion that large companies specifically don't have hit or miss design or redesigns: I'd argue there's more than enough evidence to the contrary. And, personally, I find Atlassian products to be a very good example of that.
Note: In this regard, I focus mainly on Don Norman's view on "design", which is largely orthogonal to aesthetics. It's cool for software to look nice. But if it's laid out in a non-intuitive way or doesn't prevent (or even provokes) user errors, it's not good design, period.