If a design feature makes it 1% more likely that someone's eye will be drawn to a nonuseful visual element, the only way it can go is that more people will be lost. Either they'll get fed up & give up at that point, run out of time, get confused, or guess and take a wrong turn and then get confused. It's a percentage game, and it's the designer's job to optimise the percentages to get more people through to satisfactory outcomes. “Packaging” elements that are repeated on every page are pretty dead. They communicate once and then get ignored and can't communicate much more, so pixels.
