It's post modernism. One of the principle elements of post modernism is that the structure becomes the decoration. The internal becomes external. The scaffold b

It's post modernism. One of the principle elements of post modernism is that the structure becomes the decoration. The internal becomes external. The scaffold becomes external. The walls are stripped back and the plumbing is visible, and you might even add some extra scaffolding and pipes that serve no real purpose anymore. Serifs themselves are another example of this phenomenon. When the first "Sans Serifs" were produced, as part of the modernism movement (unlike post modernism, modernism is about stripping back decoration and reducing things to their pure functional nature) they were called "Grotesk", and the hacker news of the day widely panned them for being useless and illegible and stupid. Now it's just boring and normal. In a post modernist web page, every element has border 1px, normally used only for debugging purposes, and a label explaining what type of HTML tag it is and what its attributes are. It's a cheeky rebellion against art history. It's embracing the absurdity of our technological ignorance. It's the teenager saying the word "LOL" out loud like it has no history or context.