I don't have any justification for this, but my gut feeling is that this trend was started by Chrome. They (compared to, say, Firefox) offer the bare minimum of

I don't have any justification for this, but my gut feeling is that this trend was started by Chrome. They (compared to, say, Firefox) offer the bare minimum of settings, and even the feature flags they do offer are deprecated and removed in a couple versions at most. It just reeks of a paternalistic "we know what you want better than you do" attitude to have about your user-base. You can tell that this is the Chrome team's philosophy when you go onto their bug tracker and see the vast ocean of WONTFIXes. You might even extend the philosophy to all of Google, when I think of things like "ignoring" "even" "words" "in" "quotes" come to think of it...