I'm typically a person who would agree with an article like this; I think we _lost_ something with the modern age, even if we gained a lot. (especially in terms of developer "velocity" (I hate that word)).
However, I really feel like context is important. Computers today have a context given to them over time, users don't need so much hand-holding these days because the expected paradigms are ever so subtly changed. New entrants to computers understand these new paradigms innately because they are already surrounded by the new context.
It's only when we look back we think how much usability has suffered.
Language is a good example of what I mean. Travel back 100 years and the linquistical choices that are made would not only be slightly alien to us, ours would be absolutely muddy to them.
I think you can make a case that a lot of the new paradigms like electron do not promote usage of native UI styles and accessibility.
But the Title bar being an overloaded UI element in todays context is generally ok I think.
> New entrants to computers understand these new paradigms innately because they are already surrounded by the new context.
Much of the argument is based on the idea that the paradigm is very weak. You have things like menus, where no one really agrees upon the form (traditional menu bar, hamburger menu, ribbon). When a menu is offered by a program, there is very little agreement upon where it goes (menu bar in the title bar, or below it; hamburger menu in the top right, or top left). When menus are categorized there is even less agreement about what belongs where. That is looking at just one UI element.
These muddled user interfaces wouldn't be so bad if it was a transition period that would carry us forward another 10 or 20 years. It would simply be a new design language that we communicate through. Yet there is no real evidence that is happening. The article's author pointed out that it would be easy to confuse the pictured stack of six title bars as belonging to three applications, I can one-up that by thinking that there were only two applications after a quick glance. Part of the problem is that they are mixing too many paradigms when overloading title bars. (The four title bars looked like the title bar, menu bar, tab bar, web page head for a single window while the last two title bars looked like a title bar and tab bar for a single window to my eyes.) The ability to create this artificial situation is an amusing outcome, it hides a more serious problem: there is no agreement upon what these overloaded title bars should look like.
I doubt that there will ever be agreement simply because many of the design decisions these days are about branding.
Linguist here. I think you over-estimate the linguistic change in the last century. Sure, there's new vocabulary for new things: spacecraft, hybrid (car), email, covid-19. But syntax and morphology have hardly changed at all, and you can still read Mark Twain (more than a century old) just fine, even the dialectal parts. And while we can't run the experiment backwards to see if our language would be muddy to them, I doubt it (again, apart from new words for new concepts).
Whereas the changes this thread is talking about have been major UI changes in the space of 10 or 20 years: loss of standard menus (I'm looking at you, Microsoft Office), hidden functionality, etc.
The problem with this line of thinking is that not every program is going to be used enough to make learning the shortcuts or command-line switches worthwhile.
That said, each (gui) program should have relatively similar key-bindings.
However, I really feel like context is important. Computers today have a context given to them over time, users don't need so much hand-holding these days because the expected paradigms are ever so subtly changed. New entrants to computers understand these new paradigms innately because they are already surrounded by the new context.
It's only when we look back we think how much usability has suffered.
Language is a good example of what I mean. Travel back 100 years and the linquistical choices that are made would not only be slightly alien to us, ours would be absolutely muddy to them.
I think you can make a case that a lot of the new paradigms like electron do not promote usage of native UI styles and accessibility.
But the Title bar being an overloaded UI element in todays context is generally ok I think.