> There are standards and common conventions for a lot of this in the Windows 9X/2000 design language, and even in basic HTML. These challenges could have been solved (for values of) by using them consistently [...]
The thing is that GUIs naturally have to evolve to cater to their user base. The "office" metaphor was useful in the 1980s and 90s for making computing familiar to people who were used to "desktops", "folders", "files", etc. Some of these terms still exist today, but the vast majority of users can't relate to it, so it's meaningless to them.
This is why GUIs will always have to change and adapt to trends, which will always cause friction for existing users.
My point is that by minimizing the amount of graphical elements (note: not completely eliminate them), we minimize the amount of this friction. The difficult thing is, of course, maintaining the appropriate balance of all elements while optimizing for usability, which is ultimately very subjective.
But consider that CLIs are effectively timeless. The friction comes from their lack of discoverability, arcane I/O, every program can have a different UI, etc. And yet this interface has persisted and has largely remained the same for decades. Most programs rarely change their CLI, so the user only needs to learn a few commands to be productive.
So I think that the most usable UI is somewhere in the middle. It should avoid the constant churn of GUIs, and be more accessible than CLIs. This is possible to build for power users, but it can also be made approachable for less technical users.
> I fail to see why any of these features couldn't be implemented within the design constraints of the Windows 9X/2000 design language.
That's true. But then again, what exactly is the Windows 9x/2000 design language, and what makes it better than the modern Windows GUI? Is it the basic Start Menu? The task panel with blocks for each window instead of icons? The square instead of round windows? The lack of smooth transitions, transparency, and graphical effects? The overall brutalist theme?
We can certainly add all the features I mentioned to Windows 9x/2000, and we had some of them even back then via 3rd party tools, but isn't that essentially what modern Windows has become? There are ways to revert some Windows 11 features today with alternative shells and such, so is that the ideal UI then?
When I think of Win2k, I think of the overall simplicity. This is mostly due to nostalgia than for any practical reasons. I'm sure that I couldn't stand using its barebones UI today, as much as I would enjoy the simplicity for a brief moment.