I wouldn’t throw out the baby with the bath water. There are good and bad “UX folks.” Just like there are good and bad developers. You just need to keep the bad ones away from your project.
When you’re looking for a “UX expert” and they are showing you their portfolio, ask them to show how their apps look on a phone in landscape orientation or over a slow dial-up connection, or how their designs work with a screen reader, or for a colorblind user. If they say “oh, that’s a problem for the Accessibility team,” RUN away from that candidate!
I think a better way to put it is that generally, UX experts know what they're doing. But UX experts aren't the ones that actually design the UI, that's for a UI designer, and those folks are wholly unqualified and have zero business actually making UIs because they don't know a god damn thing about good UX.
A UI designer is tasked with making a UI beautiful, a concept that is highly subjective. A UX designer is tasked with making the UI functional, which is far less subjective.
Guess which person the management takes more input from?
When you’re looking for a “UX expert” and they are showing you their portfolio, ask them to show how their apps look on a phone in landscape orientation or over a slow dial-up connection, or how their designs work with a screen reader, or for a colorblind user. If they say “oh, that’s a problem for the Accessibility team,” RUN away from that candidate!