Seriously wonder what you think the reasons the world moved on is? Everything was so clear, neat and discoverable back then. Now everything needs to be hidden behind labels that may of may not be a button. And that is on a good day because many times I need to learn a new language where a rocket means pipeline and to download an artifact from it you obviously need to press the pinkish two squares thingy. But that is actually still a good day because nobody knew that to do [useful feature] you need to click the triangle next to the lightning bolt so nobody used it. Next update it will be removed. This update will also make the now remaining three buttons two times bigger because our CAD software needs to be mobile first.
I kind of agree with this in that WIMP is a good philosophy for desktop UI design, and I feel that mobile has never really had the equivalent (hamburger menus falling out of fashion being the apotheosis of chasing rainbows IMHO)
But I feel we need only point to Microsoft Word as an example of how the statement.
>Everything was so clear, neat, and discoverable back then
just isn't true. The only difference now is that we have dozens of pieces of software in our lives now instead of the half dozen we used in the 90s, and we don't have one company monopolistically decreeing what the status quo of UI design is.
Meaningful competition is also why I think there is no WIMP in mobile. And that's a double-edged sword.
I can name only one thing that has been massively popularised since then in "professional" tools and which I wouldn't mind the older software had: command palette.
Press some hot key, and then type the name of your command in a pop up window with full-text search, autocomplete and a hint what the hot key and toolbar icon for that particular command is. Probably single most useful thing that became mainstream roughly after the ubiquitous CLI-phobia mostly went away.
