Unpopular (but secretly popular) opinion: there is no one right way to UX. There is no one right way to employ any UX methodology. There is no one right way to much of anything in our work.
The circumstances keep changing
People are wonderfully chaotic. Organizations are complicated. Products, markets, constraints, and available evidence all change. A practice that was perfect last quarter may be an expensive distraction this quarter.
I value established methods. They give us language, discipline, and useful starting points. I just don’t want them mistaken for laws of nature.
Methods are useful examples. They are not laws of nature.
Adaptation is the work
Our job is to work out what we need to learn, find a reasonable way to learn it, interpret it with empathy, turn it into something useful, and measure what happens next.
Sometimes that requires an elaborate study. Sometimes it takes a paper prototype and six conversations. The standard should be whether we have really good reasons for our approach, not whether we followed the approved ritual.
Keep the core, change the tools
As technology changes, our ability to adapt matters even more. Tools will come and go. Methodologies will remain examples. Creative, evidence-informed problem solving is the durable skill.