I agree. Win 95/98 UI was pretty ugly, but it was consistent and followed a good design language: eg everything that was clickable looked like a button: buttons

I agree. Win 95/98 UI was pretty ugly, but it was consistent and followed a good design language: eg everything that was clickable looked like a button: buttons, table headers, scroll bars etc. Once you learned the basics of the UI, you could mostly figure things out. Nowadays buttons look like plain text labels half the time and every app has its own inconsistent style and even I, someone who has used computers for a long time and use them daily, sometimes have trouble seeing what’s what on a UI.