You are conflating design with bloat. It's not the designers fault that click tracker SDKs and 15 microservices with eventual consistency is running in the background. They didn't make the mobile app 300MB.
Obviously designers can destroy products too, but we got much bigger problems than that in 2025. Most of the garbage today come from business decisions and technical fads.
I agree that applications, especially ones using web interfaces, gain significant bloat with each iteration, but I don't see how that has anything to do with what I'm complaining about.
If all that changed was that everything ran slower and took more battery power and increased the liklihood of closing when backgrounded, that's all I would be complaining about, but what I'm conplaining about here is that updates lead to reduced feature sets, buttons and links that are impossible to differentiate from inactive elements, and icons that vaguely hint at a skuemorphic past, but look more like hamburgers, kebabs, and petifores than what they're actually supposed to respresent.
What's the point of not using words on the buttons that open menus, when the menu's contents are entirely words?
Fair points. I agree the flat monochrome design of today have issues. The example you linked is atrocious.
> What's the point of not using words on the buttons that open menus, when the menu's contents are entirely words?
The truth is that real estate became incredibly constrained with mobile, and hover also disappeared. Imo the hamburgers and triple dots are close to how good you can get on mobile. There's little point in adding the word "menu" or "options". Basically any text you add on mobile would take full screen width to be safe in all languages. And thats pretty much what open menus look like - they take over the whole screen.
Due to mobile being the primary target, a lot of devs reuse those GUIs for much bigger screens, which is unfortunate.
Obviously designers can destroy products too, but we got much bigger problems than that in 2025. Most of the garbage today come from business decisions and technical fads.