Even more true now than it was then, I think.

I mean, the dock was actually quite nice in the NeXTSTEP days but OSX munged it together with the Shelf and aspects of the Win95 taskbar (actually, I think this might have started with the final OpenStep release, but I never got to use that).

These days when using a Mac, I tend to make it as small as possible and set it to auto-hide. I never actually use it for anything, but I don't think there's any way to turn it off altogether - so now it's just an annoyance, popping up with a distracting animation every time the pointer touches the bottom few pixels of the screen.

I never got along with the Miller columns in FileViewer / OSX Finder, but my impression is that it has also continued to get worse over time with features coming (and, just as often, going!) every few years without much in the way to help you discover them. TBH, I use the cli for file management by preference.