There's clearly room for improvement there, you're right, but I'd also say these kinds of tasks are severely underconstrained, and if you have a certain image of how it should look in mind, you should give it a lot of references, especially if UI is complex. Screenshots, figma, sketches, references to existing design, etc. And even then there's probably going to be a few iterations.
I've had a pretty good experience tampering with existing UI without taking time of the frontend team, but depending on the scale and your abilities, some things may indeed be faster manually still