Change through collaboration and use is exactly what you argued against: a new term is coined, used first by "experts"/influential people, then goes into widespread use and is codified in dictionaries. Right now we can watch a group of people establishing "serverless" as a word for some kind of PaaS in technical language, as stupid and confusing we might think it is (I personally hate trend and would prefer the word be used for P2P or client-side applications, but I think that ship is sailed). Documentation of expert language will soon pick it up, if it hasn't already.
For purposes other than spelling and some grammar rules, dictionaries are nice suggestions, but even in school (where the Rechtschreibreform actually has legal "power", even if it doesn't anywhere else) a word not being in the Duden didn't mean it didn't exist (and conversely, just because it is in there doesn't mean it's good to use). Professional usage has its own conventions (newspaper styleguides, common terms and ways of writing in scientific disciplines, "PR speak"), even if they make for "worse" language, common usage varies even more. And nothing actually enforces language in all those areas, which make up most of our language use. On the contrary, it's used as input for new iterations of guidelines and dictionaries.
Spelling and grammar has been "designed by committee" and relatively successfully legally enforced, the words used are not. They are influenced by motivated groups, but that's part of the linguistic discription model just as well.
For purposes other than spelling and some grammar rules, dictionaries are nice suggestions, but even in school (where the Rechtschreibreform actually has legal "power", even if it doesn't anywhere else) a word not being in the Duden didn't mean it didn't exist (and conversely, just because it is in there doesn't mean it's good to use). Professional usage has its own conventions (newspaper styleguides, common terms and ways of writing in scientific disciplines, "PR speak"), even if they make for "worse" language, common usage varies even more. And nothing actually enforces language in all those areas, which make up most of our language use. On the contrary, it's used as input for new iterations of guidelines and dictionaries.
Spelling and grammar has been "designed by committee" and relatively successfully legally enforced, the words used are not. They are influenced by motivated groups, but that's part of the linguistic discription model just as well.