My hypothesis is today's "modern" OS user interfaces are objectively worse from a usability perspective, obfuscating key functionality behind layers of confusing menus.
It reminds me of these "OS popularity since the 70s" time lapse views:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=cTKhqtll5cQ
The dominance of Windows is crazy, even today, Mac desktops and laptops are comparatively niche
The whole UI as branding thing has utterly killed usability.
This is caused by a change in who is hired as UI/UX developers. In days past it was HCI experts and engineers, now it's graphic designers. "Pretty" is the order of the day, not "useful". "There are too many menu items" is now answered with "So let's hide them" when it used to be "How can we organize them in the UI us a simple, discoverable manner?" But then that "overflow" menu (really? Needed menu commands are now OVERFLOW?) gets crowded so they start just removing features so the UI is nice.
„UX/UI developers“ is a strange name for it.
In 2000s the web enabled more sophisticated presentation designs and there was a push from client-server to web-based applications using incredibly strange technologies for building UIs — HTML, CSS and JavaScript, which gave the rise to UX design as a interdisciplinary job (HCI+digital graphics design). By 2010 the internet of applications kicked off and in mid-2010s moved to mobile, dramatically increasing the demand for UX designers. By then it actually mattered more who is hiring designers, not who is hired. Since only relatively small fraction of hiring managers does understand the scope of this job even now, they even started calling it „UX/UI designers“ or „Product designers“ as if that name change could help, still judging design work by often-fake screenshots on Behance rather than by case studies in the portfolio. Even HCI professionals are often reduced to mere graphic designers by those managers who skip research and apply „taste“ to a science-based discipline. At the same time, since UX design is one of the most well-paid and less stressful creative jobs, a lot of people switched to it without proper education or experience, having no idea what is statistical significance or how to design a survey. And voila, we are here.
I agree. It's a UI Engineer. User Experience is just the fluffification of the title to something that sounds expansive and nebulous when it's actually pretty focused and critical.