@jbigham@floe@andresmh putting on my non-glib hat, I think (1) HCI is such a big tent it would be hard to level that accusation at the whole field (or even a majority of it) and (2) for the portions of the community where it is true, there's still value in understanding how people use things they actually use (locally in time)...
... BUT (3) at some point you might want to establish a mature enough field to have theories / models that could tell you something about new tech that comes along