I think Microsoft Office 2007 moving to a "ribbon" rather than normal menus and an optional toolbar for certain things was the major break in usability. Mac OS has kept the menus, and added a really useful menu search thing in "help", and this is huge.
I think sublime text was one of the first to bring the TUI style super-powers into the modern desktop UK, where you press some random keyboard shortcut (e.g. cmd-p in sublime) and you can instantly start typing a command.
Another thought I have had for a long time is that when GUIs like Mac and Windows were taking off, they were often described as more "user friendly" than TUIs. I always thought this depended on the kind of user. A lot of effort went into prioritising making it possible for an untrained user to use a system, but making it fast for someone with experience was no longer important.
I think sublime text was one of the first to bring the TUI style super-powers into the modern desktop UK, where you press some random keyboard shortcut (e.g. cmd-p in sublime) and you can instantly start typing a command.
Another thought I have had for a long time is that when GUIs like Mac and Windows were taking off, they were often described as more "user friendly" than TUIs. I always thought this depended on the kind of user. A lot of effort went into prioritising making it possible for an untrained user to use a system, but making it fast for someone with experience was no longer important.