There is a great story about movies and VHS/Betamax.

The movie studios were pretty sure that people would want to buy movies and watch them at home. What they weren't sure about was how to price the movies because this was a brand new market that had never existed before.

This led to the price for a movie on VHS/Beta ranging from $10 to over $100 because no one knew what the actual demand curve looked like.

I feel like the 1990s was a lot like this but with UI/UX. People had opinions on what consumers wanted but the market was expanding so quickly that no one knew for sure. Firms just tried things and, in hindsight, some firms seemed "smarter" because they picked the feature set that customers ended up liking.