I have the opposite story. I had a perfectly good jaw as a kid with slightly crooked teeth that were fixing themselves as they usually do (my mom has a celebrity jaw and said that she never used braces, she had crooked teeth as a kid but just waited it out) but then got braces and completely fucked up my face in ways that are only better now that I've gotten them out for over a year and stopped wearing retainers.

The thing with them is that most orthodontists have an incredibly warped view of attractiveness and take shortcuts to their ultimate goal of perfectly straight teeth, they give their patients very ugly narrow arches and sacrifice the jaw in order to get the "perfect bite" more easily, bringing the maxilla back in overbites rather than encouraging the mandible forwards which would be better in 100% of cases