GUIs have really profoundly regressed. Go ready any UI design book from the 80s or 90s.
As you say the web is a culprit but so is attempting to shoehorn mobile designs into desktop.
As you say the web is a culprit but so is attempting to shoehorn mobile designs into desktop.
With some OS's you can't even have fine grained control over those defaults anymore. Dark modes have brought some of it back, so its better now than 5 years ago, but still worse than 20 years ago. But people pretend that having a dark/light switch is the same thing as being able to customize the color of just about every layer of the UI and have the vast majority of the applications honor it.