[esfandia]

It's certainly given too much importance in the curriculum, but the idea of having a common language (with standard semantics) for sharing design decisions is valuable.

I'd argue the issue is that because UML is not seen as valuable, everyone improvises their own dialect when drawing stuff, and so since nobody trusts people following correct diagram semantics (e.g., meaning of different arrow shapes), nobody trusts the resulting diagrams either, further reinforcing the notion that it's useless.