And even then it's user/domain specific. What is salient for a user who's an occasional user of your software vs someone who uses your software professionally every day is very different. You stop having to tune for a visual language that's universal-ish and instead have the ability to build-out a denser set of metaphors.
The "design needs to be understandable by the person writing the check who will never use it" problem is all over enterprise sales leading to software that doesn't need to look like $trendy_consumer_app but has to anyway to get the sale.
This seems to be begging for a user-switchable "dense mode" (like the fad of "dark mode" switches), which swaps the "buyer-oriented" CSS to the "I-use-this-every-day" oriented CSS.
I'm hopeful that the CSS prefers-reduced-data media feature[1] may one day help introduce this sort of thing. Sadly not yet supported by any browser except behind flags
The "design needs to be understandable by the person writing the check who will never use it" problem is all over enterprise sales leading to software that doesn't need to look like $trendy_consumer_app but has to anyway to get the sale.