Turns out bad design isn't new. I agree with almost everything you've said - there's bad design examples from every period. There's plenty of UI design resource

Turns out bad design isn't new. I agree with almost everything you've said - there's bad design examples from every period. There's plenty of UI design resources from the early 2000s and they all contain examples of bad UI. But that doesn't mean there's no difference between now and then. Having options split among labeled menus improves recall, even when it doesn't improve discovery (and it often does improve discovery because the labels aren't entirely arbitrary). So I definitely see this getting worse with hamburger-and-gear interfaces. Skeuomorphic colorful icons are usually easier to tell apart than font-based monochrome abstract line art, and they're much easier to remember, for non-colorblind users. Doesn't mean they can't be bad or misleading. As for the size of clickable items, I consistently see interface elements that span the full width of the screen (except some padding) on modern giant-screen smartphones and tablets. It seems the screens grow and the UI elements grow with them, rather than remaining fingertip-sized. And of course none of this has any place on desktop, but it gets reused there anyway.