I understand why you think these things, but at the end of the day many of these new designs are quite popular. For example, every time I even momentarily end

I understand why you think these things, but at the end of the day many of these new designs are quite popular. For example, every time I even momentarily end up on the new Reddit, I think "how could the designers have approved this cosmic mess?" Yet presumably people like it, or at least it's profitable as I doubt they'd stubbornly hold onto something for four years if it were driving users away. Remember the old "utility first" brought us things like Clippy too. And the generation before mine also sees all that GUI nonsense as cruft too. Richard Stallman talks about how he still does basically everything in emacs.