The UI changes in Blender 2.80 were exactly to get rid of the awful non-standard non-discoverable UI that has plagued the program from the start. It actually fi

The UI changes in Blender 2.80 were exactly to get rid of the awful non-standard non-discoverable UI that has plagued the program from the start. It actually fixes a whole ton of issues that the article complains about! For instance, mouse button assignments are now sane (select on left button, not right) and Ctrl+S brings up an actual save file dialog with pretty unsurprising layout and behaviour (instead of that abomination that replaced the application window contents when pressing F12 and required an enter keypress to save - there was no button). There are many, many more of these changes and they were absolutely necessary. The unfortunate side effect of this is that grumpy old users that were trained to accept the previous highly idiosyncratic UI started to complain because they have to relearn stuff. But it's worth it. And it opens up blender for more users.