I would say OOP for OOP's sake became a lot more common with the increase in popularity of Java. The euphoria of automatic memory management vanished with the i

I would say OOP for OOP's sake became a lot more common with the increase in popularity of Java. The euphoria of automatic memory management vanished with the increasing complexity of design patterns. In most of the cases they are applied for any scenario that even slightly resembles a design pattern, with most of the energy expended in fitting the scenario into a pattern than to find the correct solution.