The company I work for has done this. We constantly A/B new designs, and if the new one loses out to the control, that's it. Back to the drawing board, it's gon

The company I work for has done this. We constantly A/B new designs, and if the new one loses out to the control, that's it. Back to the drawing board, it's gone. That doesn't mean everything necessary gets chucked out immediately. Sometimes we'll then test individual parts of a design (failed or otherwise) to see if those do better on their own. And complete redesigns with similar aims do sometimes get created (but they're usually completely different in colour scheme, layout, text, etc). We also do user testing for the same stuff. That too is more important than a designer's opinion would be. So yeah, it does happen.