Beyond the OP's points, some of which can be seen across history and aren't just a "now" problem,
I feel that aesthetics have declined massively just these past 15 years. I remember the early web, and then the era of blogs and personal websites, the y2k and Frutiger Aero design styles I could see in ads on TV, on many websites, in many of the arts, etc.
Nowadays, you can't find this except in individuals' work
(e.g. those scattered across the web)
Every company's site is the same: a header image or a carousel, big sans serif text saying absolutely nothing of substance, no form nor function in their presentation. Both native software, web apps and smartphone's apps are converging to a braindead flat/material design design (and if you complain, UX people throw out arguments of accesibility (which are completely irrelevant to what UI style you choose to use), and many say that skeuomorphism is ugly (???), when in reality their UI choices are atrocious, reducing functionality by taking away options and even going as far as removing borders around most things, making it harder to know what is clickable. I've seen my parents and grandparents, neighbors and even people my age struggle with these "easy" interfaces)
I genuinely believe the effects of these design choices around everything in our lives are detrimental to our mental wellbeing, and thus I try to surround myself with 19th century furniture, and I use Windows XP for any non-internet related task. I prefer forums and personal sites in my browsing, and regularly use wiby.me and marginalia.nu's search functionality.
I only play old games and indie games too.
I know it's just a futile attempt to resist the passage of time, but I can't help it. I try to make things in this vein and I know that it's just a small drop in the ocean but I still do it.
Very similar observations about software trends and quality.
Particularly the trends to remove essential functionality like one importat example in Windows 11 that you cannot put task bar on left or right side of screen and using ungrouped and fully labeled items. It's de facto unusable for my case because I need a lot of different windows with constant context switching between and was totally lost (went back Windows 10). Left/right taskbar has all items exactly the same place where opened, enought text to instantly indentify what program and what document/IP address etc. it contains, nothing moves itself and it's almost muscle memory to glance and see what program and window I need to open the current moment.
It's not the most popular use case for sure but if even 0.1% users like developers or other multitask heavy workers need similar overview on desktop workspace then that is like ignoring 10 million users. And for what? So that company can optimize away like two workers on Windows UI team for 6 months effort. Instead released broken Windows to RTM and 2 years later still essential functionality missing.
There have been problems in this area before, like Windows ME and some but those were more like broken drivers and things that were not or at least did not seem to be intentionally broken, just bad quality. Now there are more problems that are literally in the genre of f. u. user, we do what we want and optimize everything to 51% users, if you are in 49% then good luck.
Maybe need to adapt and accept that everything needs tinkering, third party tools and constant management after updates to be barely usable, still not fond of this method but what are the options any more.
Every company's site is the same: a header image or a carousel, big sans serif text saying absolutely nothing of substance, no form nor function in their presentation. Both native software, web apps and smartphone's apps are converging to a braindead flat/material design design (and if you complain, UX people throw out arguments of accesibility (which are completely irrelevant to what UI style you choose to use), and many say that skeuomorphism is ugly (???), when in reality their UI choices are atrocious, reducing functionality by taking away options and even going as far as removing borders around most things, making it harder to know what is clickable. I've seen my parents and grandparents, neighbors and even people my age struggle with these "easy" interfaces)
I genuinely believe the effects of these design choices around everything in our lives are detrimental to our mental wellbeing, and thus I try to surround myself with 19th century furniture, and I use Windows XP for any non-internet related task. I prefer forums and personal sites in my browsing, and regularly use wiby.me and marginalia.nu's search functionality. I only play old games and indie games too. I know it's just a futile attempt to resist the passage of time, but I can't help it. I try to make things in this vein and I know that it's just a small drop in the ocean but I still do it.
There's this article from the Guardian in a similar vein https://theguardian.com/artanddesign/2011/jun/19/grey