I love good visual designers, and the ones I know definitely communicate with a lot of people too. I have absolutely no negative attitudes about them! Our work relies on their hard work in establishing a scalable design vocabulary. That definitely doesn't happen in a silo, and requires a brain.

This article is solely about the problem of hiring product designers as if they'll be doing extensive visual design every day, when in reality they'll mostly be building out new features consistent with an established design vocabulary. We don't typically sweat buttons, list views, or how to build the UI too much since those problems (should) have already been solved by design guidelines.