Ask HN: What is the modern take on the role of design regarding visioning?

I’m have a hard time understanding whether it’s an industry shift or something more local. The design org in my company has decided to dedicate 50% of their capacity for the last six months or so to what they call “Visioning”. I’ve found a few articles about this, but not to the drawbacks. It seems to be that the expected output is a few features pulled from the exercise to roadmap validates the effort but this seems like an astronomically expensive effort for a few reasons.

1. Whatever comes out from this will then have to be adapted. 2. Design is basically becoming a shadow product org by choosing what features to illustrate that can be pulled onto the roadmap. 3. The vast majority of the design is thrown away because it isn’t addressing actual business needs.

Does not #3 especially become depressing for the designers who worked on the visioning to see their work being basically tossed away? Does this really validate the cost of the strategy in general?