>> This leads to overemphasis on the visual aspect of the UI and not enough on its functional and usability aspects.

Accessibility has been left in the dustbin as well. You go to all these sites extolling these beautiful, innovative sites and they're completely useless with a keyboard or screen reader.

Or if you have any sort of non-correctable visual impairment. I'm sighted but recently I had actually been thinking of learning better how to use a screen reader because I genuinely struggle to visually parse a lot of modern UI design. The big move toward flat designs, but with everyone choosing their own idiosyncratic special snowflake way of doing it, leaves very little visual redundancy for people to use as a fallback. Sad to hear that it might not be the solution either.

Also, holy hell, this obsession with huge swathes of negative space is a disaster for anyone who needs to zoom the page for readability. I'm here to see content, not an homage to the backrooms.