Grow Up

Reducing design to pure visual style is similar to reducing programming to writing lines of code. Neither is enough to create a useful, engaging product. Neither nice code nor nice style in itself means that your product is good.

I assume the original post was written in response to a personal experience and then generalized into blanket statements. This seems to happen a lot online with all the "X lessons from Y" blog posts floating around.

No, you grow up.

Find some evidence to back up your thesis rather than pointing at pretty stuff and saying "see, designed!" and ugly stuff and saying "see, no designer here!"