[maestroia]

>But because a lone Product Owner sees a path to promotion if they can figure out that one single killer feature that will get a massive new adoption of hypothetical new users (hardly ever realized).

This++. It's also the young hotshot phenomenon, where they come in and decide they can do everything better than the old timers (the previous hotshots 3-4 years ago), and change everything they can. We've all been there.

I have elderly family members, 85-plus, who can't understand why the UI changes all the time and they have to continually relearn. Explained this way, they get it, but still say, "they need to remember that not everyone wants to relearn everything every couple of years".

[amatecha]

Yeah, I get frustrated about this A LOT. "Change for the sake of change", and chasing meaningless KPIs and metrics that involve ZERO value to users and only serve to benefit the vendor (usually at the expense of users, in fact).