> that it did what I want and actually just picked one word. Each application designer decided they wanted to make their own change and made the whole system fragmented and worse overall.

This is the trouble. It's been decades of the OS becoming less and less relevant. Apps have more power, more will to build their own thing.

And there's less and less personal computing left. There's the design challenges, the UX being totally different. But the OS used to be a common substrate that the user could use to do things. And the OS has just vanished vanished vanished, receeded into the sea. Leaving these apps to totally dominate the experience, apps that are so often little more than thin clients to some far off cloud system, to basically some corporations mainframe.

The OS's relevance keeps shrinking, and it's awful for users. Why bother making new UX for the desktop, if the capabilities budget is still entirely on the side of the app? What actually needs to change is's UX of the desktop or other OS paradigm (mobile), it's a fundamental shift in taking power out of the mainframe and having a personal computer that's worth a damn, that again has more than a quantum of capability embued in it that it can deliver to the user.

(My actual hope is that someday the web can do some of this, because apps have near always been a horrible thing for users that gives them no agency, no control, that's pre baked to be only what is delivered to the user.)