Still don't understand how we went from this to modern GUI toolkits.
It looks and works so intuitively.
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It turned out that focusing on a splashy and idiosyncratic brand not only excited prospective new users but inhibited them from going elsewhere since it made transitions more awkward and frustrating. That made more money, more easily, than focusing on user efficiency and feature distinctions as had been the trend before then.
The technology then trailed behind this fashion and invested its complexity budget in style customizability, animations and type rendering enhancements, etc and gave up on trying to encourage a standard design language that publishers and users could both build fluency in.
My taste did not; I experienced this shift as the triumph of designer ego over humble usability, and a little bit of my youthful love for computing died in the process.