I'll be honest and say I don't like this trend in UX. The article is right that they are merely following others, so I won't lay this on them as their fault, bu

I'll be honest and say I don't like this trend in UX. The article is right that they are merely following others, so I won't lay this on them as their fault, but it feels like making icons buttons look less like buttons is reversing a trend a lot of people are used to, as well as reducing contrast for older users and disabled folks. I think the most recent change that stuck in my mind was recent firefox's redesign. I recall the GNOME team priding themselves on actually starting the original gnome 3 redesign based on studying usage patterns, and against the angry grain I was on their side and used gnome 3 for quite a few years. I have to wonder whether this design was passed by any accessibility folks or even studied, it seems like it is against that spirit of actually evaluating usage patterns.