But what if I want a faster horse?

For any given thing or category of thing, a tiny minority of the human population will be enthusiasts of that thing, but those enthusiasts will have an outsize effect in determining everyone else's taste for that thing. For example, very few people have any real interest in driving a car at 200 MPH, but Ferraris, Lamborghinis and Porsches are widely understood as desirable cars, because the people who are into cars like those marques.

If you're designing a consumer-oriented web service like Netflix or Spotify or Instagram, you will probably add in some user analytics service, and use the insights from that analysis to inform future development. However, that analysis will aggregate its results over all your users, and won't pick out the enthusiasts, who will shape discourse and public opinion about your service. Consequently, your results will be dominated by people who don't really have an opinion, and just take whatever they're given.

Think about web browsers. The first popular browser was Netscape Navigator; then, Internet Explorer came onto the scene. Mozilla Firefox clawed back a fair chunk of market share, and then Google Chrome came along and ate everyone's lunch. In all of these changes, most of the userbase didn't really care what browser they were using: the change was driven by enthusiasts recommending the latest and greatest to their less-technically-inclined friends and family.

So if you develop your product by following your analytics, you'll inevitably converge on something that just shoves content into the faces of an indiscriminating userbase, because that's what the median user of any given service wants. (This isn't to say that most people are tasteless blobs; I think everyone is a connoisseur of something, it's just that for any given individual, that something probably isn't your product.) But who knows - maybe that really is the most profitable way to run a tech business.

You’re talking both about tastemakers and the silent majority vs loud minority.

I promise it is NOT always a good idea to follow the enthusiasts, because they are not at all like everyone else who uses your thing. Following them will skew your decisions—unless they are your entire customer base, so, have at it.

This article imo is complaining about the effect of middle management product owners at large companies. There are two dynamics that both converge on enshittification:

1. These product managers (or product designers) are early in their careers and want to make a splash. They are given lower priority projects but try to break out by making them bigger, better, more non-horse-like. They over-design and over-complicate the solutions as a result, because they don’t yet know when the right solution is just a refinement of what’s tried and true. They are incentivized to do this because they want to break out of the mold.

2. The managers above them, or a layer or two above depending on company size, are risk AVERSE. They are tasked with delivering results regularly and consistently. If you have the innovation bug or are creative at this layer, you get moved onto projects where this is required, which is not most of them. Overcomplicated is fine sometimes with you but WEIRD is absolutely not okay (the stuff that actually could be innovative), and no one gets fired for following The Metrics.

These two incentives clash to create overcomplicated but functionally poor products that aren’t helping anybody out. A healthy skepticism of complication and a healthy skepticism of engagement as the sole metric (or metrics in general) is necessary to make good shit. Sometimes it is actually understanding and using things as an enthusiast would, but you need to bring in an understanding of how the rest of your users are distinctly different from the enthusiasts, too. Using your thing yourself and actually following your own subtler feelings is what produces really useful innovation, slowly and surely over time.