I would agree that what you state are factors, but I would disagree that they are the main factors.
One thing I notice in my work (in product management) is that people naturally gravitate towards shiny things. So we design things to be shiny in order to attract those people.
At various points, a specific aesthetic gains popularity because, for well-founded reasons, it increases usability and readability. Then everyone starts to imitate it, partly because it works, but also partly because people are drawn to it. Then frameworks are created to enable teams to rapidly replicate the style.
At a certain point, the frameworks are good enough to just replicate the style in basic settings with little input needed from someone who is actually thinking really hard about the design. In many ways that's a good thing because it lowers the barrier to entry. It's much easier to make things because the framework drastically reduces the amount of wheel reinventing you'd need to do. But you end up with designs where nobody really thought that hard about it - and so you end up proliferating potentially bad defaults encoded in the frameworks.
I'm personally much more willing to believe that the decline in overall design quality is due to negligence from convenience.
In my work, I have noticed that users are reluctant to move towards shiny things, and it is the developers of the shiny things and some manegers who gravitate. The rest of us get pushed.
Exactly, in web design almost no one actually thinks about the user, it's all about impressing each other with shiny things, rather than well thought out user experience.
One thing I notice in my work (in product management) is that people naturally gravitate towards shiny things. So we design things to be shiny in order to attract those people.
At various points, a specific aesthetic gains popularity because, for well-founded reasons, it increases usability and readability. Then everyone starts to imitate it, partly because it works, but also partly because people are drawn to it. Then frameworks are created to enable teams to rapidly replicate the style.
At a certain point, the frameworks are good enough to just replicate the style in basic settings with little input needed from someone who is actually thinking really hard about the design. In many ways that's a good thing because it lowers the barrier to entry. It's much easier to make things because the framework drastically reduces the amount of wheel reinventing you'd need to do. But you end up with designs where nobody really thought that hard about it - and so you end up proliferating potentially bad defaults encoded in the frameworks.
I'm personally much more willing to believe that the decline in overall design quality is due to negligence from convenience.