The original user interface components had a lot of detail, and focused on learnability.
Look at the original scroll bars, they do quadruple duty: they tell you how long the document is, where you are in the document, let you jump to the area of the document you want, and let you scroll slowly. Modern scrollbars are a tiny strip that you have to keep poking at to make them visible; how is anyone going to learn to use that unless they already know about them?
So many products have a short lifespan now, apps and websites, that it's not worth the time making them amazing. Anything good required someone to improve it over and over. I save links of cool projects I see on Hacker News and half of them stop working after a year. Almost none of them have their full original functionality after 5 years, and are full of broken links, crashing backends, and incompatibilities.
Look at the original scroll bars, they do quadruple duty: they tell you how long the document is, where you are in the document, let you jump to the area of the document you want, and let you scroll slowly. Modern scrollbars are a tiny strip that you have to keep poking at to make them visible; how is anyone going to learn to use that unless they already know about them?
So many products have a short lifespan now, apps and websites, that it's not worth the time making them amazing. Anything good required someone to improve it over and over. I save links of cool projects I see on Hacker News and half of them stop working after a year. Almost none of them have their full original functionality after 5 years, and are full of broken links, crashing backends, and incompatibilities.