I agree that the modern web design greatly suffered from lacking actual "designers", but don't think it's purely a gender issue (I mean, this field does have an overwhelmingly huge gender issue but also some more). I can say this because I actually worked with web designers as late as in 2020, and it was quite hard to communicate what is needed for modularized UIs. Probably designers see the whole picture while programmers like me see individual components---no one is incorrect, but you'd need a good way to reconcile them. Without such reconcilation, programmers tend to take designers' job away because they at least can make a working app by themselves.