It seems like once the graphics capabilities became common, OS interface developers used them even when they shouldn't have. Remember when moving windows in Linux had a "jiggle" to them? The genie effect in OS X? What about the "cube" of multiple desktop? I still don't know what the point of transparent windows is.

A few effects are useful - like aero peek in Windows.

For minimize, whether it's a line that shrinks, a genie lamp, a simple shrink effect, it's all the same. A simple visual cue telling you where it went.

A little form with the function is fine with me. There's a ton of computing power in even the weakest of machines. That said, I hope we'll always be able to turn it off.

Even a default install of Raspberry Pi OS uses a composited window manager on the RPi 4 now.

Why is this desirable? Objects in the real world have many inconvenient properties.

When you release a new OS version it has to look fresh or nobody will want it.

What's worse is, (at least IMO) they aren't even particularly pretty.

But about half of Linux YouTubers proudly display them. (Between you and them, the clueless one isn't you.)

And the F1-Help! In context, boring but always available.

And the rearrangeable toolbars, native!! The status bar, not the flimsy tooltip at the bottom which disappears.

And the treeviews! And the files ordered by name! Nowadays everything is ordered by “Most recently seen” so you can go back to the past because of the infinite roll. Everything was ordered and safe there. But you would lose your mind if you didn’t reorganize your desktop regularly, and that has faded away, no-one needs to organize files nowadays.

Windows had reached an incredible level of usability, complete with blind and disability support, scriptable, standardized, reorganizable, repeatable UIs.

Then the web appeared and despite having a searchbox in every app, there still isn’t a keyboard shortcut for it.

This infuriates me. None of the browsers have a shortcut to "search this highlighted text with Google". I instead have to right click, and carefully pick the option between "Print" and "Copy".

Not a single one, for an operation I do 200 times a day. I do not understand how it is possible. It's the most common operation I do in a browser.

Oh my gosh, yes. This is what drives me to distraction with recent Android releases. I'm tapping on things in the battery settings menu that used to do something, but no, not anymore.

Seriously, what is so damn awful about having some visual indication of what is a button?

The HIG is no more at Apple. GNOME design decisions are justified with comments like "I asked some friends and they liked this better". Most of the pain in Windows 10 are all the jagged edges where you cut from one era to another for no particularly good reason.

This is muscle memory and plasticity in action - the relative locations, stateful appearance, and behavior of controls gets mapped in our brains in the same way as taxi drivers learning the routes in a city, a violinist learning fingerings, or a child learning the alphabet.

"Muscle memory" is required to establish foundations of more complex behaviors. Once you've built a user interface, you should not ever touch elements upon which the users have built those muscle memory mappings. Yo Yo Ma would be as lost as a child if you told him he had to play the bassoon instead of cello. After a couple years of practice, some of the higher level artistry could be brought to bear on the new instrument, but it's the low level fundamentals that matter.

Firefox screwed with fundamentals, and their market share is evidence of why that shouldn't be done.

Windows keeps pushing down that path as well, mistaking their current dominance in desktop as something absolute.

With MS, they just seemed to stop paying attention to their own guidance and much preferred doing their own thing (see most editions of Office!), people just got fed up and it seems like it crumbled from there.