I think there's a lot of truth to what you're saying, but a lot of software platforms just can't be customized and mastered like they used to. Things like reorganizing columns, setting shortcuts, menus being consistently organized and accessible using the same command, clickable text and elements looking visually different from unclickable, a wide variety of colors being streamlined to color/pale-color/off-white trios, etc. I use a lot of operational software and every platform just can't be mastered like the old stuff. (And animation lags, too!) And I can watch my younger coworkers on the new software packages, they're certainly not faster on the new stuff than I was on the old stuff.

A few months ago my dad and I roused out the old Windows 2000 computer we used from 2002-2010 and while it took about 6 minutes to boot up, once it booted up, the software was all astonishingly fast (no telemetry) and way, way more "commandable" than their modern equivalents. It was like a tool shop.

I think there’s two separate things going on here.

One is that software started being designed in a one-size-fits-all manner for a “uniconsumer” that vaguely represents every user the software will ever have. Personally I think that analytics-driven development is largely to blame here; through those you don’t see user groups, just numbers going in whatever the product manager deems to be positive and negative directions. We don’t design for specific users, but rather to produce desired metrics.

Second is that professional UI design got flooded with designers from other disciplines who only really understand the visual half of software design. The functional, interaction, and user research parts completely fell by the wayside as the job became more focused on coming up with designs that would do numbers on Dribbble and look pretty in a product page or presentation and is driven mostly by vibes now.

What happened is ordinary people started using computers. In the early days of the industry developers could assume a reasonable ability in their users. As computers and smart phones became ubiquitous they could no longer continue with that assumption. You see reorganising columns as a feature, the average user is totally confused and stopped in their tracks when they do it by accident.