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Customizable look and feel means lack of consistency, and confusion as to why things look different without good reason.

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Consistency is overrated. Context is what matters. And context often requires customized controls.

We will never live in a world where an abstract concept like a checkbox can have an 'assigned' specific visual affordance that doesn't allow for adjustments. Such thinking is stuck in the past and won't allow for new/better UI paradigms.

Consistency is a shortcut to usability; context is the long way 'round. Don't take the long way unless you're prepared to do so with care.

This purist talk about how everyone should stick to some system standard or whatever really needs to die. It's not working. Nobody is doing it.

Everyone, literally everyone is running their own thing. Name me big company that doesn't roll their own design system.

Preaching purism really doesn't help anyone, let's just accept reality as it is, and stop chasing some utopian dreams that just won't ever materialize (and if only because it would make a lot of jobs and professions useless, overnight, and there's too much inertia for that to happen).

I’ll keep complaining about it as my parents age and struggle to use their tv apps to watch shows because every product manager needs to prove that they can reinvent the search interface.

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