In a lot of places the “product design” is just the agglomeration of AB tests conceived by a large and widely distributed army of junior PMs. There is no one person responsible for the end to end experience, no top down vision, no one who’s ever going to say no on design or conceptual integrity grounds. At most an idea can get killed for having weak or negative experiment results.

I’ve never worked at Apple, but my understanding is that they have/had gatekeepers, from Jobs himself on down, to tell you your idea isn’t part of the vision and we’re not going to do it. And a lot of workers hate that!