You cannot assume that the people making decisions are rational, smart, people. They may believe falsehoods, and act accordingly. They may be chasing a hidden goal (eg: "I get a bonus if I hit X metric, so I'll kill good parts of the site to do it")

I worked at a place where management was like "we want to increase time on site", and the lead dev was like "I can just add loading spinners everywhere then". Luckily management was a little smarter and move involved than that, and didn't approve that strategy.