Design thinking isn't fine. Have you heard the news about IDEO? :)
First, we don't agree on the definition of "definition." :) You're telling me some of the steps one might do to "do design thinking." Yet funny enough, I often hear 5 steps and you gave me 8 steps.
The definition of design thinking is stickier. You and I probably don't agree on what it is or what it's for. That's where I hear what feels like hundreds or thousands of different definitions. We covered this in a YouTube video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ltkhvScFXn0
Second, design thinking is a microscopic derivative of HCD and UCD. So when you sum up the steps as you have, they "sound right," but are still missing a lot. "Talk to users" is often done wrong. Which users? How many? Where will we find them? Do we talk to only happy users? Do we talk to target audiences who aren't users? I'd say that's where you get the best information, which means I might not want to talk to "users." I might want to talk to people who fit our archetypes but aren't users.
And then why "talk"? What about observe? What will you watch people do? How will they do this? What will you ask them? This is often done wrong.
And that's just your first "step." You can do that "step" but if you want it done well, it has science, rigor, standards, etc. If you say "I talked to users," and it was planned, done, analyzed, or reported on poorly, you might have set the project up for failure. You'd have bad data that people would rely on as fact. These are some of the reasons we have so many product, feature, and experiment failures. Bad data we think is good or "good enough."
We can teach "The Scientific Method" to children. It has 5 or 6 "steps." But you can be sure when a REAL scientist does anything, there are more steps. There is rigor. There are standards.
Design thinking isn't fine. It's a microscopic "anybody can do it" derivative of a thorough and scientific process. Anybody can do a surface, incomplete version of it. And since it's a Scientific Method, it can look like it's working better than what you did before. But that doesn't mean it's good or great or the best way.
Design thinking will go out of style, especially as people ask questions about how IDEO is failing as a company (again) right now. They sold us out. They sold out what professional CX and UX practitioners do. They sold out what they do.
I caught a few logical fallacies in what you wrote, and one was that you keep finding the same info from multiple sources. Sure, but it's crappy information. :) Google's UX course is a poor course IF one wants to learn good UCD or HCD. If you just want to learn the least you can do to claim you are doing UX work, then sure. You can always find faster ways to do things. You can always find reduced and minimized ways to do things. And you can find lots of sources, which can reinforce that this must be the way to do things.
It's a start IF it's better than what you're doing now. Design thinking is worse than what I'm doing now, so to me, it's a downgrade. It was created for people who weren't me but were hoping to quickly become me, so it'll always look strange to me. It's a surreal world when people have been sold a microscopic way to do what I do, and are sure it's so great.
And if you ever need someone who's prepared to answer you at length as to why design thinking might range from incomplete to sucking to dangerous, find me. If the people you've been asking had no answers, you asked the wrong people. Drop me a note. :) Because this was the short version. I have hours and hours of this on YouTube, and could easily go on for hours and hours.
Design thinking only looks like it works because it might be better than nothing or whatever you were doing before. Smoking a pack a day might look like it's working compared to how much you used to smoke. :) Design thinking is still generally garbage. So if you like it, imagine how wonderful real HCD will be when you learn more about it and practice it. :)
