You're right, it's not user-centered design, it's creator-centered design, like those god-awful lightbox overlays for subscribing to newsletters that are the most horrible interference ever. And no, I don't care that they have huge conversion rates, they piss off the user, so they are bad design. This is the kind of garbage designed by marketing people, not tech design people who know anything about good UX.
I wish there were a way to quantify "they piss off the user" -- I was never able to successfully do that. Even if we were to show 10 of 10 people in qualitative interviews hated them, Marketing would still point to how many signups they yielded.
