The best I can steelman is that they're sitting on data that shows users actually want the current behavior which is why it's there (which could be true? I don't know - I'm not the average user).

They'd have to disambiguate that from the obvious motivated reasoning that's likely to exist there too.

Even then, sometimes you know better than users when making long term bets about what you do, faster horses and all - it's part art and part science.

Average users are also not necessarily the best to optimize on. 99% of wikipedia users never write anything. Does that mean the users that write are relatively worthless?