Most of personal blogs in HN that I see on the top page usually look like they were made in the 90's, with either no CSS at all or simple CSS with just big paragraphs of text and no substance in between. I cannot stand them. My zoomer ass needs to be stimulated by getting eye candy while reading the content.
That website is poorly made. What's with the scrolling.
Anyway. Yes. It's a very very complicated software with hooks decades back. That's a feature not a bug. He's mad that it's complicated to customize, or really, understand and build UI customization for, including third-party applications implementations of them? What?
People still use mission critical software from 30 years ago that relies on their old implementations of context menus. So what?
I'm not sure the article author should be speaking with such certainty and authority on the subject of what constitutes "good" UI.
A lot of what makes interface elements effective is predictability. Context menus are boring, consistent, and predictable - or they should be. You shouldn't ever be in a situation where you right click on something and say "wow! that's beautiful! that menu is so amazingly well done!"
Software is intended to do things. If your interface gets in the way of things being done, then the interface is the wrong tool for the job. Making things flashy or prioritizing aesthetics over functionality for the sake of appearances makes every element you co-opt automatically the wrong tool for the job, regardless of how "pretty" it might be.
If your site takes over scrollbars, the correct response to "what do you think of the custom scrollbars?" should be "wow, I didn't even notice a thing."
Tell that to Microsoft, Google, Mozilla, Apple. They either never heard of it or they don't care.
That's never a feature, and I'm curious what amount of stockholm syndrome can make one say so. It's the bullshit-est menu implementation ever made and everyone has to suffer from it since 30 years ago.