Your point seems to assume that reading manuals is the 'right' way to learn about working with a system. While it is the preferred way for myself I acknowledge

Your point seems to assume that reading manuals is the 'right' way to learn about working with a system. While it is the preferred way for myself I acknowledge that it is not for a lot of other people. Furthermore you can easily configure any distro today to 'respect history' as much as you desire by changing a few config files. That doesn't change the face that the average person interacting with a *nix OS today will not share this history. Discoverability in UX is a key concept. The people who came up with what you call 'history' simply had no clue about it. Human Computer Interfaces (HCI, what now broadly falls under the term 'UX') was a subject you studied decoupled from the rest of CS (if the university even offered this). People writing tools where oblivious to UX. And the users where the same folks. I would go as far and say that ignoring this and insisting on these modal editors as defaults because 'history' indeed borders on arrogance for this very reason.