In some ways I prefer the older interfaces to more modern ones because, even though they were ugly, it was often more obvious what was clickable, what workflow was expected, and if you needed something it would probably be in the horrendous menu tree somewhere. Nowadays it's often impossible to determine what is clickable and what is not, but things look much prettier. I don't really need pretty, it's just a nice-to-have. Of course there are newer interfaces that are easy to understand and older interfaces that are borderline unusable. It's just been my experience that an older interface will be easier to use, though probably more annoying to go through. YMMV.
I think the clearest delimitation between old and new is a lot of old interfaces really tried to make every GUI element appear distinct. I think as we presume that users are familiar with basic GUI elements we’ve started replying on them having intuition from context clues instead. “The button doesn’t look pushable, but we know that you expect a button here anyway.”
I signed up for a Lemmy instance a while ago, and just stopped using it because the default lemmy web UI adopted 2010s worst trend of making buttons, text areas, and combo boxes all the exact same featureless rounded pill. It’s legitimately difficult to use on a phone. One big pile of pills that do random things.
