Absolutely spot-on.

However, most folks (not just designers) have a difficult time with compromise, these days. It's become a value judgment (You're "weak," if you compromise).

I learned, when I was a kid, that I can't always get what I want (I think that someone even sang about it, way back then).

The art of compromise, is one of the most valuable skills I had, during my career, and I'm still at it. In fact, I was just texting with a team member, a few minutes ago, where we have to come to a compromise.

Compromise is the last tool in the designer's toolbox. Before settling with a compromise, the designer should relentlessly try to narrow down what the problem being solved is, while trying out all possibilities, until it looks like there is no solution that matches exactly the problem (or they run out of time).

More often than not, a compromise means that the problem wasn't scoped out well enough, and it ends up partially solving a problem that didn't need solving.

Is this a response to marketing lingo specifically or some other cultural phenomenon? There's a difference between what you want to do to advance your goals (e.g. compromising), and what you want to say for visibility for whoever's goals they are (e.g. "uncompromising" the customer's goals).

There might be a deeper point being communicated, not sure, but I see no issue here.

Well there's compromise that means multi-dimensional constraint optimization, and that's fine. But a lot of time what people mean by compromise is they compromised on cost, or on effort, or on attentiveness. Colloquially that's what people usually mean when they use the word with a negative connotation.

"Design depends largely on constraints." - Charles Eames

Not quite. Design is about optimization (of user experience, performance etc). Optimization implies constraints. Constraints are what made you think of "compromise".

similar to what a person is capable of. we cant be good at everything, we're specialists; backend engineers, frontend developers, machine learning engineers, etc... as in design, it cannot appeal to every eye, being opinionated makes good design stand out.

The problem isn't compromise.

It's pretending there isn't one.

Every product optimizes for something. The interesting question is what it chose to sacrifice.

the way i see it is that design actually never get treated what its meant to be treated as - a service to help make business more money..