I am in fact. If I remember correctly (I may very well not!) Mac OS 8 or so (maybe 8.5) was the height of the let's-never-ever-deviate-from-the-HIG days.
This also included a glorious commitment to the desktop metaphor, when that phrase meant anything: you really could map your mental representation of virtual objects onto their real-life analogs and expect things to work remarkably like you expected.
Now, I don't know that a desktop metaphor is the right way to interact with a computer (I certainly avoid it like the plague), but it seems preferable, in my experience, to the hodge-podge of mixed metaphors that the modern desktop UI has become, in both Mac and Windows.
I'm reminded of the scene in The Big Lebowski when the protagonists encounter a group of nihilists: say what you will about the desktop metaphor, but at least it's an ethos.