The typical corporate software is now primarily serving the needs of the developer and the user is secondary. In many cases the user has no way but to succumb (due to lack of competition or enterprise/workplace policies etc) and eat their frustration because there's no alternative, or they're not allowed to use the alternative or the alternative is equally trash.

For me one of the biggest issue is that neither the developer, nor the UI/UX designer are actual users of the software they write. If you don't actually understand how users end up using the software, best even skip the interviews with users, you'll never be able to write software that truly serves the users.

Additionally, you have the separation between developers and UI/UX which leads to another area where trade-off needs to be made to accommodate (new) requirements. In that sense you might be right, that when the developers created everything, they were able to shape something way more efficient and concise, but often also at the cost of looks and potential accessibility.

A second issue I see is, that software these days is always developed for the average user, where as in the past software was developed for experts. As such the look becomes "simplified" and the UX dictates a layout that is cumbersome to use for experts and power users.

When you take something straightforward which is grounded in hard logic and measurable outcomes, and try to combine it with abstract concepts about feelings and organizational goals that overlap with multiple philosophies, a massive amount of space for endless argument over details is created.

It's called late capitalism. We cannot structure a society around not only profit, but infinite growth, and expect that not to give us any problems. It does.

You cannot just sell as many copies of Photoshop as last year: you must sell more, each quarter, and more expensive. You cannot sell as many phones as last year: you must make batteries non-removable so phones break quicker, you must spend 3x your R&D budget on ads to manipulate people on buying an identical phone to last year. Etc etc

By inventing a new term, that generation of designers signature that they were ignorant of that past work. And the specific choice of terminology further signalled the shift in values for the designer. It was no longer about creating optimal interface points between the human and the computer, it was about creating "an experience".

It centered creating a distinct brand identity for the application through the design, a goal that is anathema to the goals of HCI. Because of this, it was not enough to use the native UI toolkit of the system, which had been carefully designed around consistent experience. It became necessary to reinvent UI tooling from scratch, with the primitive elements available in the browser engine being readily available for doing such. The cross-platform nature of the browser also presented an opportunity for the MBA- and SV-driven focus on monopoly to pursue total market dominance, rather than just creating one good app for the users you have on the one system.