"View options should include settings for list/details view, not sorting options" is age-independent

"Control optimized for screen size".... on a desktop? It's not a mobile screen.

The fact is that "designers" and "developers" like you don't understand the problem and have trained a new generation of people to not expect anything to work as expected/natural/intuitive while throwing away decades of user interface and experience research.

What you are essentially saying is that you no longer feel like this is expected/natural/intuitive.

And that's a perfectly fine thing to say. I'm mid-30s and I still like sticking my credit card into the machine instead of tapping it. It feels comforting and normal. It's not the better experience, objectively, though.

The absolute same thing applies here. The button is clearly visually distinct halves. If you are not familiar with that paradigm, I understand that it feels unnatural. But given that the fucking tooltips on each half are literally "List view" and "View options" and the hover state is clearly identifying that the button is two parts... what exactly do you want here? The view options has the list setting RIGHT FUCKING THERE. Important enough it's literally at the top level to make it easier to switch, given that that's the thing you most often do with the button. It's objectively the better power user experience - changing views is only a single press, instead of multiple clicks.

You can certainly make some HID research complaints with modern designs, but this really isn't the one that's going to be a compelling example.