> they only started hiding them because it looked 'cleaner' to some UI designer.

They started doing it on mobile in order to give more screen real estate to the content area. This was then translated to desktop apps at the same time desktop screen real estate became a non-issue for everyone (a 32" monitor at 1600x1200 used to be a luxury, now it's mundane). Now no one knows if there is anything "below the fold" without initiating a scroll action, which just encourages people to further only focus on the above the fold content.

Interestingly the response to that was sites adding horizontal "progress bars" across the top of the viewport to indicate how much you had read. And with application and website control of the styling and operation of these standard widgets, everyone is slightly different, which increases time to become familiar.

It's been a race to the bottom, in the name of (the subjective at best) "clean design".

> Always showing vital elements like the scrollbar isn't a skeuomorphic choice, it's always a good idea, they only started hiding them because it looked 'cleaner' to some UI designer.

There’s a lot of modern design in not happy with, but this is not personally one of them. If I can’t autohide scrollbars I try to turn them permanently off instead of permanently on. For some reason I find them very distracting, and since I anyway use a scroll wheel or trackpad or keybindings, I don’t need it to scroll. (If it’s on autohide, I use it as a progress bar when actually scrolling.).

But there’s a lot of these weird things that seemingly everyone else accepts that just really throws off my focus. Blinking text cursor is another one, I just can’t get any work done until the blinking is off. If an app or OS can’t do that, I won’t use it.

Skeumorphism isn't necessary for consistency in user interfaces, but it generally ensures a level of consistency that is honestly hard in modern interface design.

What I hate most about mac is the opinionated design. I liked it in the days of Tiger and Leopard but what I didn't like since was some designer deciding that I have to use my computer in a different way every year and forcing changes on me. Opinionated design only works when you as a user have no opinions or if you are a follower.

Personally I do have strong opinions how my computer should work and I'm not a follower. I could never work in an army and take orders either.

The problem was that early OS X used to be pretty aligned with my own opinions so I didn't notice the issues with this model. But after the Mac becoming more frustrating every year I finally dumped it and now I'm really happy with KDE which I can configure how I want.

> why would they make it hard to find the thing I just downloaded?

In… the downloads folder? How much more obvious does the location need to be?

UX was mastered 31 years ago. The intervening years have been a nosedive.

What do you mean about Steam?

> none of them are automatically fixed with skeuomorphism

True.

But they absolutely need to stop hiding functionality in order to present a "clean" interface.

Sure, I've seen some cluttered interfaces. I recently launched LibreOffice Calc and damn there were a lot of buttons on that toolbar (I may be using an insanely old version).

But like...disappearing scrollbars makes zero sense and should never have been implemented on any interface.

oh gawd, please please please do not interpret this as pagination of windows with overflowing content!

the image carousel type dots or similar old skool pagination indicators are so much worse than a simple scroll bar.