"The team considered 300 icons in all"

"Total disregard for the process." (Implying this mess is worthy of being called a process)

"All those explorations were actually up on the walls all over their office"

"a subtle cue to anyone that watches, which says, "Hey, we did a ton of work and this didn't happen by accident!"

How did we get here?

At what point did designers working in tech/startups decide this was in any sense a sane way to design?

Why are we supposed to praise them for throwing shit at the wall in the form of several hundred arbitrary variations of a camera glyph?

This idea that somehow putting everything on walls so the whole office can stick their oar in is asinine. It's pure design by committee.

Throwing shit at a wall to have it judged by committee is still just a popular piece of shit on a wall.

"Have some fucking empathy. Everyone is trying hard."

I'm not going to have empathy for someone doing their job, but I will pity their misspent effort when a more appropriate solution could have been achieved in a fraction of the time with clearer creative vision and management.

Designing 300 logo variations for ANY brand isn't creative direction, it's a full on creative train derailment going straight off a cliff and head on into a preschool. It's laughable that any designer in these companies signs up for this shambles of a process and genuinely believes just because they're passing a pile of glyph colour and border radius treatments daily that it's somehow well invested design time.

Funny how if someone perceives that a design didn't take much work, it's not good. How do I make something look like it took A LOT of work?

Taking too much effort to achieve something poorly doesn't make it good. Plenty of well regarded design classics didn't take a lot of work. It's the finished product that matters and if it's poor then pointing to the mountain of rejected ideas isn't going to make it any better.