Why did UI's turn from practical to form over function?
E.g. Office 2003 vs Microsoft 365
It's easy to remember where everything is with a toolbar and menu bar, which allows access to any option in one click and hold move.
Seriously? Big ribbon and massive padding wasting space, as well as the ribbon being clunky to use.
Why did this happen?
People spend lots of money to buy big screens, only for apps/websites to use a fraction of it.
I cannot control how every application or website I have to use looks, but where I can, I try to find solutions.
When I am occasionally on reddit, I use old.reddit. I use addons for youtube, to remove unecessary stuff, or open videos directly in mpv.
I use reader mode to make many sites easier to navigate.
Mastodon and Lemmy have a much better design than Twitter or new Reddit.
On the one windows machine I still have, I use the classic shell, to replace the start menu with something more usable.
I use Libreoffice, and many other Software with sane functional UI.
I don't want to use old software, because the older software gets, the more hostile the environment becomes for it.
A lot of UI decisions on the Internet seem driven by the need to create empty spaces to put advertising into, and with adblocker it looks just bad.
The bulk of these aren't issues with modern design, IMO, it's about enshittification of the services we use.
Having huge spaces for ads, for example, isn't a "this is how UX should be" thing, it's a "lets shove ads everywhere to make money" thing. If you put the same amount of ads in older software/on sites that look like they're from 2002, it would also look terrible.
The Windows start menu isn't bad because it has some padding and easier click targets, it's bad because the search doesn't work, it's full of ads, and pushes Bing searches on you.
Etc.
Yes they are, UX designers are not asked to make more efficient or usable designs, they are asked to make designs that "look good" in marketing, support ad integration, hook people into others services provided by that same company, make it more difficult to incorporate with workflows that include third-party applications, etc.
This is deliberate UX design, which is part of the enshittification process.
You are thinking of an entirely different thing.