I'm not sure I would consider it too dense. If anything I think they tend to be too sparse, although this could just be that they're often used for marketing type sites, which seem to want to make you scroll and click a lot for anything anyway, even if you have the screen space.

The status dots are a part of animations in general, which they overuse, especially things like transform/scale on hover and hover effects on many many elements.

I think it's not simply borders but contrasting-color borders often with box shadows.