Disagree. It looks prettier but its often not more intuitive.

Not 1983, but Windows 95 all the icons had text underneath them, so you knew what they did.

More recently it took me a couple of years of seeing hamburger menus to make the connection "it's an icon to give you a menu". Those are everywhere but are in no way intuitive.

That may have been true circa 2010, but in the past decade we've seen rich settings menus and compact, information dense interfaces stripped away in favor of "mobile first" designs.

Typically, whenever a website / program I use gets a UI update, the only change is that all padding on buttons, text, etc. has been increased by 50% meaning I need to scroll in order to see a 5-item list! Windows 10 control panel is an example of this phenomenon.

There's no reason we can't make rich, useful and intuitive software that's crazy fast with today's tools.

Almost everything on computers is more deceptive, user-hostile, and tracked than in 1983.

Maybe than 1983 but versus 2003 the main positive changes have been greater bandwidth and storage. Everything else useful we have now we had then, pretty much. Some of it was a much slower, some of it was much faster. The only OS & environment I've seen that was significantly more intuitive than anything around in the 90s and 2000s is iOS up to version 7, at which point its intuitiveness started going to hell.

The screens are better, for sure.