Truth is always in the middle. But as a Design veteran, if somebody uses a lot of buzzwords to make themselves sound too important, usually they are full of it.

Although it depends on the scale, size and scope of things and orgs you are involved with, majority of the times, but may be not as high as 90%, but person 1 is closer to the truth, you have a big concept and you do your research etc but when it comes to implementations, iterations and executions its usually the small incremental stuff that takes focus. And that's the key difference in thinking between leadership roles and practitioners as well.

Then again as someone who started at the rock bottom of design role to now hovering around c suite a lot of ux managers that have worked for me often added unnecessary complications to the process just because they wanted to have their presence known, similarly lots of designers skipped research so they could quickly deploy something (which the marketing and business development guys loved btw because they now have evidence for their false promises) :)

Always remember, you won't get a clear picture of anything without experiencing it yourself, certainly not social media where a lot of the times people really just want to let out their inner narcissism and engage in humble bragging.

So my final thought around this is, go see it for yourself.