I think an indicator that something is going wrong in UI design is what I'd call the "the food is in the fridge" anti pattern that seems to pop up lately.
Essentially it's UI text in random places telling you what steps you should take to activate some other feature, instead of - you know - just providing a button to activate that feature.
A variant of this is buttons or menu items that don't do anything else than move focus onto another button, or open a menu in a different location, so you can then click on that one.
Increasingly seeing this in Microsoft products, especially in VS Code.
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