I agree, Netflix serves it's purpose like a champ. A company doesn't need to run their front end like a hackathon in order to be great, in fact, much of their demographic might have had a learning curve just to learn how to watch movies on their ipad, so doing drastic UI redesigns might actually create a churn from subscriptions. Netflix works on basically every platform(even ubuntu now) with basically no issues except for the native install, and gets right to the video after only a few clicks/touches. Remember when they were carousel and now they're a direct slider? Seems they would simplify due to data. Also the argument for no front end work I find to be unfounded as some of THE BEST Javascript, reactive programming seems to be coming out of the netflix shop with amazing event listening management presentations and and other impeccable reactive front end coming out of netflix. I use those videos to study and learn tons on reactive javascript and find their front end to be exactly what it is. On a meta level and simplicity level superbly build and prestine.
In my experience building consumer products "feature creep", and "unnecessary complexity" are the enemy. Not lack of features and frequent updates.