It's extremely late, so I'm going to Choose Violence™️
Old-timey interfaces from the dawn of computing were clearer and more readable because they were for actual computers, aka Big Fucking Machines For Doing Serious Things On:
- designed by a programmer that wanted to surface all the options. These weren't great, because it usually resulted in a wall of buttons, but every single god-damn possible button was there, potentially across multiple grouped tab pages, and each one told you exactly what it would do, because they'd either just be text, or be text and have a tooltip.
- designed by a UI/UX expert on graph paper, and then/or implemented with the same super-fucking-basic UI toolbox that was extremely limited in what it could do. Mostly text, perhaps a checkbox/radio button, maybe text + lowres 256colour icon, or just one of those icons, but most importantly: in 99% of those cases, those icons came from a limited set that was used all through your OS of choice, and meant and did the same thing in every single fucking program.
These days, UIs are a fucking wild west of little fiefdoms and "visionaries" (aka 5 year olds with a crayon) trying to monopolise your attention on Your Mobile Phone Of Choice first, which means that everything looks fucking different across every single gag "app" or webpage (which is what programs are becoming more and more too thanks to That Demon Electron, May Its Designers Burn In Hell Forever), and there's absolutely no such thing as a tooltip any longer, because how the fuck do you do hover on a stupid touch screen? You don't, so Not Invented Here, that's how.
You don't need to have anything explained to you anyway, just do what you're told like a good little consumer in your little baby-proofed glass box, and give all your money to the worshippers of Mammon.
Things stop working on your device because you haven't bought the new iFloop 74 Xz. Bad little consumer-serf, you should be ashamed of yourself, throw that old thing in the trash and go give us, your capitalist lords and masters, 5000$ for a new thing that is basically the same as the old thing, but now comes in chartreuse. Pay no attention to the mountain of tech trash, we need to buy ourselves a fifth yacht to go pollute the ocean with, so you better make that line go up for infinity.
It's not like that trash and shortages are going to impact us anyway, just you and any coming generations, but who cares about those. Not us, that's who.
