I talk a lot about how "empathy" in commercial UX is mostly a posture because in reality capitalism doesn't care, but it's important to consider the additional problem of people in charge who are too shallow to be capable of understanding "why" some people prefer, or need, to do things differently than they do.
This one time I was telling the ceo/founder of a startup I worked for that our react app was making my new macbook pro crawl and we need to fix that because it was a b2b product that would be used by people in finance offices decked out with dell opticrap machines. He responded with surprise "wow, steve. you really care about people don't you?"
I was kinda floored. Anyway, here we are...
https://web.archive.org/web/20230727121010/https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1684491212219359232
I'm speaking in the sense that he's a desperate idiot trying to make twitter cost him as little as possible. He's walking around that hell hole asking for ideas on cutting costs.
Except if you cut development costs your app will suffer, and thus be less profitable. If people don't want to use your app because it's a pain to use, then you're cutting out a part of your userbase... and thus a source of profit.
but fascism is a core functionality!