As soon as developers actively hang out with real users in real life and genuinely observe them without intervening, i’m all for oss projects without uxers.

Game dev here. Play tests are excruciatingly painful. Spend some time showing off a game and you can see why so much ux these days are "boring" and samey. Deviating off the beaten road takes so much extra polish compared to seeing how competition controls work and copying that.