Maybe for older people who used it back then and have nostalgia for it, but I think at 35 even I'm too young to find that UI appealing for daily driving when linux has WMs/DEs targeted for minimalism, efficiency and productivity but in a modern way.
Otherizing your users like this IS THE PROBLEM. Every technologist was once a "nontechnical person" (for whatever definition of that useless term you like) who learned and grew and thereby became "technical". The very minute you start thinking of your users in these terms you have lost the entire fucking game.
I broadly agree with your point, but I think the causal root of the problem is this industry arrogantly treats it's users as, to quote Mark Zuckerberg, "dumb fucks." We didn't always do this. It used to be better.
Philips just screwed up my TV. They've updated the firmware (of course, it was automated) to make home screen more of a dumb fucking experience with everything animated and self-playing movies jumping out at you for no reason, and so on... But the interface is now completely unusable - literally can't even launch YouTube. No amount of resetting helps. They also hid all the previous firmwares and I can't even roll back from a USB stick. I am a dumb fuck when it comes to TVs. And I will most likely be considering another brand next time.
I think Apple struck a good balance for a while--and to some extent still does--at least in the OS X era of treating users with a bit of respect. Not trying to make an interface for "power users" or "nontechnical users" but instead just making one for "computer users".
It used to be that we made tools for people, and endeavored to make them well. Now we make tools that treat people (their attention in particular) as a cash crop to be harvested. Everything is about "engagement" and the like. I prefer using tools that had effort spent on making them useful, not effort spent on "monetizing" the user.
I think the thing tech nerds do of trying to distinguish between "technical" and "non-technical" users is extremely arrogant, and in a way adjacent to the downright sociopathy of "monetizing" a user base. If you care about making something good, don't start down that road. That's the game--making good tools that help people do good work.
Recently, I fired up Win 3.11 in 1600x1200@256 mode to run SimAnt, and was pretty shocked at how much better it felt than most modern operating systems.
I kind of feel like the start menu + task bar were a mistake now.
It is nice having the bluetooth + network icon somewhere accessible, but maybe <ctrl>-space should just pop up a thing that lets you type program names + also temporarily hide all windows over 10% of the screen or something? That'd solve the problem of trying to find program manager to run a second program. Also, the windows in windows approach of program manager wasn't great. Still, it's better than most things out there these days. The icons are so... clean.