This happens because people need pretty fancy UIs. And companies want to provide these UIs. We should be using text and structured data for all services by def

This happens because people need pretty fancy UIs. And companies want to provide these UIs. We should be using text and structured data for all services by default. Companies should be providing simple, very simple text (or JSON if you want that) APIs by default and people should and could learn to use them. Web browsers or other apps should and could be packed with nice UIs to browse these APIs. Optionally, after these default browsable easy-to-use APIs were working, people could translate them into more fancy UIs, but for most things, like booking flights, that wouldn't be necessary at all (who wants a flashy colorful experience when buying tickets?).