I'm 50 and spent most of the 90s building Windows GUI apps. I think you misremember it. As a general rule dialogs (especially the ones built with dialog builders) were static with fixed pixels sizes; double the screen resolution and the dialogs were half-size. Layouts were extremely static; even Java AWT's primitive flow layouts were almost revolutionary by comparison to what was available in MFC et al.

Modern web design is a mess, yes, but it's vastly more sophisticated than what was available in the 90s and I would not choose to go back.