This is so true. I love going on an internet journey and ending up on some present-day Japanese website that looks like it was created in 1997. The modern UI/UX cancer hasn't metastasized over there yet.

Language barriers, man. You can't defend against bad memes without them.

Seeing Hitoshi Doi's anime information web site, exactly like it was in the 90s, <TABLE> layout and all, is so refreshing: http://www.usagi.org/doi/

Or Chinese, which is even denser. If Latin-based languages are the equivalent of the C family, then Chinese and Japanese would be like the APL family.

I'm a native speaker and I find those dense website hard to read. Harder than English (my second language) ones.

I think it's a "grass is greener" case. I appreciate the trend of adding extra padding around the English internet a lot. If they're designed like their Chinese counterparts they'll be barely readable for me.