Pre-web there are plenty of "human-computer interface" documents / guides / etc. And UX research and demos (e.g. The Mother Of All Demos).

Pre-software there are plenty of "design of everyday things" books, schools of thought, movements, etc.

This is nothing new, aside from our current state being driven by a recent surge.

Absolutely. The work of user experience research has a long history and is very important. What is new is every single "app" (website) inventing their own entire conventions and "language". This still happened with desktop apps, but it was rare typically limited to the largest players (Microsoft, Adobe). You can do a tremendous amount with basic, bog-standard, GUI widgets if you apply them well.

Part of the problem is that we just don’t have a std lib, or std UI framework for the web. In both Windows and Mac, the basic UI happy path involves using the pre-built libraries and UI components these companies created to make apps somewhat consistent. There is nothing like that for the web — which is part of what the article gets at.

I mean, we do? There’s Tailwind now, and there was a time when 50% of the web was bootstrap or wordpress.

Quite a few of them, yeah. jQuery UI was a huge, massively widespread thing for a while too.

People still do their own things of course. Like how tons of Windows apps build completely custom stuff (e.g. Winamp). Or very nearly every single videogame.