In my experience, today's recipe is "follow the trends of market leaders" (see e.g. everyone jumping on Material Design), and after that perhaps "optimize for conversion". Listening to UI/UX people, I often hear about not confusing the user, not burdening the user, removing obstacles. What I never hear is empowering the user, providing value to the user, enabling the user to fulfill their goals (as opposed to leading them through the path to monetization).
Although you call into question Material Design, I’ll argue that it was a force for good since it added consistency among apps and moved a lot of app-specific functionality within the central left-side menu, making features and settings more discoverable.
I'm not really criticizing Material Design per se here, just people jumping to it (especially on the web) regardless of whether it makes sense for a particular product.
Oh, there's a lot of thought there. Back then, people didn't bother thinking about the interface at all, and just pushed the lib provided widgets on the same place they were everywhere (there were plenty of bad metaphors that became prevalent, there were many stuff that research showed that it shouldn't be done, but everybody did anyway).
Today people are always optimizing (for the showroom), always redesigning. That's part of the problem, not of the solution.
