IMHO when you're strongly incentivized to optimize for engagement stats attributable to you, you're pushing change for the sake of change with the darkest of UI patterns to ensure your changes are selected and "favored".
FAANG-like organisations like to use statistics to drive decisions. As others have mentioned, things like "engagement", A/B testing, percent of users using a feature, etc...
This often leads to absurd decision making or false incentives. Things like the GUI shifting around making people click the wrong button by accident will increase engagement metrics and look like a positive thing in the reports.
Take Netflix as an example. If you set your UI language to English and live in Australia, Netflix allows you to choose only five languages:
- English for the hearing impaired
- Italian
- Simplified Chinese
- Traditional Chinese
- Vietnamese
Note that that list is for a show that has alternate audio languages like French and Italian, but you can't select all of those languages for subtitles. But here's the thing: Netflix has the subtitles in about 100 languages for every show. They just refuse to let you select them.
My parents are immigrants and like to listen to shows in English but have subtitles in their native language as a fallback. Netflix says "no". My partner is an immigrant and she's not Italian, Chinese, or Vietnamese. Netflix says her language just doesn't matter enough to make the list. I sometimes like subtitles, but I hate the hearing-impared subtitles. I don't matter either.
What's happened is that some overpaid statistician at Netflix figured out the top 5 most common languages for each region, decided that 99% coverage is "good enough", patted himself on the back, and the 1% can get fucked.
That statistician is probably paid 3-5x as much as me, and his job doesn't even need to exist. Just show every subtitle language available! Easy! No need to pay some "smarter than you" person to decide what you can and can't have.
Notes:
Apple TV shows every subtitle language, so there can't be any arguments saying that this is impossible or difficult or whatever.
If you call Netflix support, they will gaslight you and say that this is a copyright issue. It isn't, Netflix hides subtitles even for shows they produce themselves.
It's possible to do some combinations in any region. E.g.: setting the UI language to something other than English will make other subtitle languages show up. Some combinations are impossible though. So if there's some random couple like an Italian guy with a Filipino girlfriend, they can't do Italian language audio and Tagalog subtitles ever. Netflix has decided that their relationship is statistically unlikely and excluded them as outliers.