I don’t like UIs where i can search only for 1-5, 6-20, 21 and more.
This, absolutely this! I recently had to use a web app whose date filtering consisted of nothing but "1 day ago; 1 week ago; 1 month ago; older than 6 months" when I was looking for a record that I knew was in March of 2018. It frustrated me enough to make me exclaim out loud an unabbreviated WTF!? A peek at the API calls it was making showed those options hardcoded directly into the "filter" parameter, so I couldn't just inject my own custom date range --- something which I have done before with success.
I wrote a short script to scrape the (paginated, infinite-scrolling style) API and filter the tens of thousands of records myself, and almost half an hour later of waiting for those records to come back, found the one I was looking for. Doing that filtering on the backend DB would've probably been nearly trivial, and all the UI needed would be two date pickers (a long-solved problem), but because of that idiotic design choice, I wasted both their and my resources.
Sometimes I feel a lot of modern software has authoritarian tendencies
This, absolutely this! I recently had to use a web app whose date filtering consisted of nothing but "1 day ago; 1 week ago; 1 month ago; older than 6 months" when I was looking for a record that I knew was in March of 2018. It frustrated me enough to make me exclaim out loud an unabbreviated WTF!? A peek at the API calls it was making showed those options hardcoded directly into the "filter" parameter, so I couldn't just inject my own custom date range --- something which I have done before with success.
I wrote a short script to scrape the (paginated, infinite-scrolling style) API and filter the tens of thousands of records myself, and almost half an hour later of waiting for those records to come back, found the one I was looking for. Doing that filtering on the backend DB would've probably been nearly trivial, and all the UI needed would be two date pickers (a long-solved problem), but because of that idiotic design choice, I wasted both their and my resources.
Sometimes I feel a lot of modern software has authoritarian tendencies
It's not just software, but you're right. I've referred to "modern design" trends as "authoritarian minimalism" too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30018763