From my experience I don't think product and management folks care much about the user experience either; it seems to be mostly ego and dick-measuring.
My target user is someone running 3G on their phone on the commute home in a crowded train. The designer's sexy animations and carefully coordinated state changes are not worth the extra 100Kb of 3rd-party dependency JS required to get them to work, because the user is not going to see them; they're going to switch away from the app after 10s of staring at a blank page waiting for the JS to download.
Seen too many "perfect" designs on a laptop monitor right next to the router in the dev studio fail completely in the wild. Every Kb matters.
Unless you have anything more than anecdotes and feelings to contribute to this discussion, I don't think there's anything more to discuss. Data makes a more convincing argument for such bold claims, especially when a minority of practitioners claims that their way of doing things is more correct than a much larger majority. I will say, from your maligning of "product and management folks" to your anecdotally-driven interest in page weight, its like every dev stereotype ever.
My target user is someone running 3G on their phone on the commute home in a crowded train. The designer's sexy animations and carefully coordinated state changes are not worth the extra 100Kb of 3rd-party dependency JS required to get them to work, because the user is not going to see them; they're going to switch away from the app after 10s of staring at a blank page waiting for the JS to download.
Seen too many "perfect" designs on a laptop monitor right next to the router in the dev studio fail completely in the wild. Every Kb matters.