Users: we want this quality of life improvement; it would drive tons of interaction!

UX Designers: how about shorts?

The only recent redesign I actually thought was good was Wikipedia.

They recognized that the most common user need by far is to read and navigate the article the user is already on, and they put those controls front and center. I know people got upset that the discovery links became less prominent, but overall it felt like the designers actually thought about the use case and designed for it.

every time I hear about a so called UI/UX expert is studying how to improve some web/app I like, I always panic.

The panic is, most of the times, justify.