"But OO had been sooo successful w/ UI widgets, that many people hoped to repeat that success more widely. OO also provided an easy way to dumb things down--"everything is an object" obscures all the hard questions--just start with objects, and keep writing code until the thing works."

That's a silly argument. It could be applied to almost any programming language. Just start with functions...

The hard choices are what data structures, and algorithms to use and OO does not get rid of that.