UI design is inherently a waste of time for artists.
I'm in tech because they pay me big bucks to basically do nothing, and as I rise the ranks, I can do even less and get paid more. Can't pass on a gravy train.
Luckily with remote work, it's becoming easier to do 10-20hrs for the same pay 40-60 (accounting for commute and other incidental costs) used to get. So I can finally use my technical skills to benefit myself way more than what I'm selling to my employer for the first time in many years. In a way, this transition to remote work is making it so I can clandestinely get a BigCo to finance my longterm career & personal software dreams ;)
For what it's worth, I did exactly this for years even in the office. But I agree, remote makes this way easier for everyone.
Who are you to say what is and is not art?
In other words, a UI as an artifact might be art. But UI design as process is different to the creation of art as a process. You could do both, but they're mostly orthogonal.
Sites and exposes like the parent of this entire thread serve to inflate the worth of people who do this stuff.
Painting the mona lisa is talent. Arranging text and pictures with flat colored geometric elements is NOT talent.
The idea that the still life painting is even comparable to some website design is laughable. It takes a lot of skill to be able to create that painting, it takes almost no skill to devise the layout to that site.
It requires little skill to do it badly, and it's easy to get away with doing it badly. That's not the same thing.
This is like people who read some cheesy superhero comics and declare that comics can't be real literature.
Minimal/simple/clean designs are not only simple visually but simple from a intelligence and effort standpoint.
There are many UI designers/programmers but their aren't many Character artists/programmers, 3D artists/programmers, animators/programmers, concept artist/programmers.
The reason is the latter examples are two freaking incredibly hard skills to combine. The former dual skill set is common because UI design is extremely trivial compared to the later skill sets.