UI design is trending in a bad direction. UIs are being designed as some sort of modern art piece rather than a
tool that is designed to be
used by
humans.
My favorite example is VS Code vs Rider.
VS code looks like a toy. A big stack of unlabeled vage icons that require a decade of context to intuit. Compiling your program takes three clicks and a context switch away from your code! Unless you're a normal person who hasn't memorized those icons, and then it's six or seven clicks while you fumble through the menus.
Rider is a classic ugly UI. everything has labels or tooltips. There's a goddamn toolbar with all your common controls. Building your code requires one single click.
Not a single person is going to stare at your landing page like it's a genuine Picasso. Your ui is not going to be placed in the museum of modern art.
A UI is a tool. If someone has to ask you how to use it, it's not very good. If your users are fumbling through menus after the first hour, it's a bad design. If a user has to have the documentation open at all times to decode your hieroglyphic icons, it's a bad design.
As for my own UI design, the core philosophy is first-order accessibility. If you have to do a task every time you open the program, then that task is accessible with one or zero clicks. If a user asks me what a button does, it gets a better label or a helpful tooltip as well as a mention in the docs. My UIs look like something out of windows 95: simple controls laid out in a grid in clearly delineated functional groups. Everything is labeled and laid out in a way that places the most common controls in VERY OBVIOUS and CONVENIENT locations. It's ugly because it's designed to be used and not looked at.
If a user spends time in my program that isn't related to the task they're doing, I've done something wrong. If someone has to ask me how to do something, it means I have to rethink my design. If users are relying on documentation to navigate my program, I need to redesign.
I respect ui designers who build helpful and useful UIs. I don't respect designers who drop all text and sprinkle a dozen abstract images on a vast barren wasteland of screen space.
ETA: I'm an engineer and I build engineer style UIs: brutal in their simplicity, and utilitarian above all else. Literally not one person who will ever use my programs will care that it's ugly so long as it works.
At some point we've lost the idea that programs should be useful more than they are "pretty". It's a trend that I find frankly abhorrent, and I believe it's one of the major factors that's making software as an entire field worse and not better.