My brand new (just arrived today!) stove has these capacitive buttons, and in terms of visual style it does indeed function perfectly; it's entirely clear which parts of the interface are buttons, even though most of them have only unadorned text.
But I think that analogy falls short in one major way, which is that these buttons are logically grouped and evenly spaced across a surface that consists of _nothing but_ buttons. If there's silkscreened text there, you can press it and do something. The visual display of information happens in an LED display set aside in a well-defined area, so things to look at and things to press are 100% clearly delineated. In a desktop/mobile/web app, where content and interactive elements are interspersed, you lose that obvious context clue. That inevitably adds cognitive load, even if the interface is still technically usable.
An additional problem for capacitative buttons in the kitchen is that my fingers are often moist or even wet, and this is a disaster when it comes time to punch cap. buttons.
Not only do they not work, no only do they sometimes trigger adjacent controls, but to get function back I now have to dry both my hands and the control surface.
I will never purchase a kitchen device with capacitative controls, but I run into them enough when traveling to experience this frequently. It's a mess.
The old paradigm of sealing a rubber dome button under an unbroken sheet of plastic worked just fine, my folks had a microwave for 20 years that worked that way with no switch failures.
But I think that analogy falls short in one major way, which is that these buttons are logically grouped and evenly spaced across a surface that consists of _nothing but_ buttons. If there's silkscreened text there, you can press it and do something. The visual display of information happens in an LED display set aside in a well-defined area, so things to look at and things to press are 100% clearly delineated. In a desktop/mobile/web app, where content and interactive elements are interspersed, you lose that obvious context clue. That inevitably adds cognitive load, even if the interface is still technically usable.