They may not look pretty, but they work a lot better than the over-designed crud with pretty UIs. As a SysAdmin, I hope none of these enterprise vendors ever hires a single designer.
No, less is not always better.
Exactly. Reading Tufte's books I learned that if you are aiming for actually useful instead of just pretty, you'll end up with denser information display.
If I wanted whitespace, I'd get a 800x600 screen from the 90s, and create a border around it with white paper. Lot more power efficient, same effect.
I still think that my comment is appropriate for the general stance of the article, but the downvotes were undeserved (I upvoted you, for that matter)
It's a bridge between design and engineering. They are often two halves of the same coin.
There are many aspects of design other than visual design (aka prettiness, as you call it). Usability, workflows, integration with other tools, onboarding process, documentation, etc, etc all fall within experience design. I'm not familiar with the tools mentioned in this article, but if a UX designer has never worked on them, I guarantee there's lots that can be improved without making them any more pretty.