I feel the same, and not just about "beautiful". Any time a marketing person tells me how to think about their product, it pushes me away. Tell me what it is, now how I should think about it.
Imagine having an artist who does paintings and an architect both come up with a concept for a building. Then have each explain their design decisions and why you might select that concept. Each are going to use much different language, though each concept might still be described as beautiful by a judge. Of course, you still need to craft your language to appeal to the buyer, but an architect can probably still do that more effectively. And that architect likely isn't going to use the word "beautiful." The architect's message would likely resonate with me because I could feel the domain knowledge and craft skills shining through.
I think you be comparing an amateur artist with a professional architect (which isn't surprising; amateur architects are very rare and professional artists have less visibility.) Only amateur artists would actually describe their work as "beautiful".
If you go to a gallery or museum and read what a professional artist says about their own work (usually found on little cards next to paintings/scriptures/etc.) their descriptions tend to be about much more focused on what they were trying to convey and how they used that medium to do it.
This is also what I've seen from professional architects.
That doesn't mean you would be any more swayed by the professional artist, but it's at least more apples to apples.
If only an amateur would use the word beautiful, then was it an amateur who wrote the content for this site?
The core of my comment was that different professions use different language. In your example, I may find a similar level of skillful description of their work, but that's not going to cross over into different domains. The architect would likely write a more compelling pitch for a building design concept than an artist who is a painter. The artist may not use the word "beautiful" but still may use other language which is a similar miss in domain language used for a successful pitch.
In my field, I have to sell software development services to customers who may not be technical. I have to be careful to limit the depth of my technical explanations. But I'm still going to use just enough domain language that the customer will intuitively understand that I have a better grasp of the work to be done than the newly hired sales guy who is doing a pitch for the company he represents.
Here's a snippet from "above the fold."
> Beautifully designed, privacy-focused, and packed with features.
Packed with features? That's like creating a menu item in your site nav entitled "Stuff" or "Misc."
You mean "tell me what it does". Beautiful is what a thing is. And what a thing does follows from what it is.
Contrary to modern misconception, beauty is objective. Taste is subjective. What makes good taste is alignment of the subjective with the objective.
So, in this case, we can ask "what makes a browser beautiful?". Well, since it is a tool, then its usefulness is intrinsic to the kind of thing it is. So, how useful it is as browser is constitutive of its beauty, as beauty has to do with the perfection with which something realizes the kind of thing it is.
> You mean "tell me what it does". Beautiful is what a thing is. And what a thing does follows from what it is.
If they state in the readme that it's a web browser and I can compile it using GNU make then I'll believe them. If they say it's whizzy fast and easy to learn then I'll consider that's probably somewhat true. If I read "beautiful" and "paradigm-changing" and "redefines the browsing experience" then I imagine they're just trying to puff themselves up without having anything concrete to back it up.
It's true that things can be beautiful, and there are some universal (enough) beauty standards. The signal of being beautiful is not saying "look how beautiful I am" though. It's easy to claim something like that and hard to refute, so it's not a very good signal. The beauty should speak for itself, or at least be attested to be a third-party like with a quote from a review.
