UX was always a bullshit field. Large tech companies learned they could spend A LOT less time and money by adopting boring homogeneous design instead of paying artists to create beauty. See anything Eli Schiff wrote circa 2015-2016. He covered all of this in detail. Design used to be a respectable field. Now it’s all would be business analysts larping as UX designers who couldn’t draw their way out of a paper bag. They use big words and complicated methods to “design” systems that are intentionally ugly. You could say the same thing about a lot of fields I guess. The world is a now a very dull and ugly place. Just look at how at the past (the distant past), and how much artistry and thought went into even the smallest of everyday objects. This same process of modernization has happened to software. Except it didn’t take hundreds or thousands of years. It took a decade.