Personally I find UML (in its full, standardised form) is still a lot more complicated than is normally necessary too, but it does include versions of several useful ideas.

I have often seen a group of developers discussing something and then someone sketches a simple diagram showing entities and relationships, transitions of a finite state machine, or message-passing similar to what UML would call a sequence or communication diagram.

However, in my entire career, I have never seen anyone actually draw out fully annotated UML diagrams using the official notation, nor any instance of some of the numerous diagram types UML specifies. And that includes working at places where everyone had been given UML training!