likely a case of wanting "one design to fit all devices".

That's a pipe dream if I ever saw one. Desktop and mobile inputs have entirely different properties and constraints.

And "one design to fit not maximized windows on not high-dpi screens."

The new design vs the old design.

https://imgur.com/a/rV1UXc4

Thanks for that great perspective, I can absolutely see the benefit of the new design in a cramped display or at lower resolutions. OTOH, the comparison at 4k is strikingly different.

The old wikipedia design predates consumer access to 4K monitors though.

The reason the text wasn't wider is because long lines of text are hard to read. It's why newspapers typically arrange their text into columns, rather than having one article being 2-3 lines long stretching across the entire page.

Unfortunately for power users, "one design to fit all devices" is done by designing for mobile first. Desktop is treated as a giant tablet. Hence the large buttons and huge distance between elements.

It’s greatly complicated by how widely variable modern monitors are. Web designers can no longer target px or vw for width and space between elements unless the set a maximum width for the content.

I don’t share OP’s gripes with the changes to Wikipedia’s UI, but there are approaches to responsive design (which one might phrase “one design to fit all devices”) that don’t arbitrarily hide useful stuff in a menu where there’s space to accommodate it. And those approaches have only gotten more capable in recent years.

The problem, if there is one, is information hierarchy and deciding whether/how/where to disclose a given information at a given level in that hierarchy and how it’s disclosed. It’s very situationally dependent and probably impossible to please everyone. Optimizing it for the best outcomes for most users is what most good designs do, and they very seldom do the things a lot of vocal HN complaints want (shove everything on screen close together with small text, ie optimize for desktop power users; or make everything infinitely configurable, ie optimize for… idk even what the optimization serves, the same users complain about the web being overly complicated).

And yet it feels like all designers are doing this. Some Rust docs, rendered by mdBook, was annoying me just yesterday with this.

(It's perhaps worse in that way, since it's the tooling generating the HTML, of course, so this is just going to propagate…)