Old designs used to fit more data in 1024x768 (or 800x600) than we get now in high-res, high-DPI widescreen displays.
There's a personal finance app I use that was recently modernised, and it went from being able to show me 50 transactions on a 1920x1080 screen to barely being able to display little over 10 transactions at a time. No improvement, just... padding.
this calendar widget. [..] My gripe with this design aesthetic is the loss of information density. I'm an adult human being sitting at a large display, with a mouse and keyboard. I deserve better. Not every interface should be designed for someone surfing the web from their toilet.
Here's what the PayPal site used to look like. I never fell to my knees to thank God for giving me the gift of sight so that I might behold the beauty of the old PayPal interface. But it got the job done. Here's the PayPal website as it looks today. The biggest element on the page is an icon chastising me that I haven't told PayPal what I look like. Next to that is a useless offer to 'download the app', and then an offer for a credit card. I can no longer control the sort order, there are no filter tools, and you see there are far fewer entries visible without scrolling.
> If you're only displaying five sentences of text, use vanilla HTML. Hell, serve a textfile!
I like this author. Current size of my entire personal site is just under 900k, including all downloads, the blog, and images. You could read it on a TI-83 with the right software, a modem, and a dialup account. Could probably even display the images since they're 1bpp bitmaps.
I used to run flashy DEs years ago. Enlightenment for all those who remember, with all the bells and whistles turned on.
As years went by, I started to remove everything. I now use an automatic tiling window manager with no borders. I actively disable all animations, and I use colors much more thoughtfully (color yes, but only where it is needed), so that by default my laptop looks a lot more like those old screenshots than a today colorful tablet.
I'm now quite pedantic on how text should be rendered the way _I_ want, and it should be the same _everywhere_.
So in a sense, I see why the current look is attractive and my younger-self would approve, but in retrospective the bland-but-consistent look is what I eventually moved on to by choice for a lot of reasons.
The current UI trend in my mind is considerably worse from an UI perspective than what Windows 3.1/95 (and same-era DEs) would offer.