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Yeah, if my memory serves a lot of UI design started to get more airy around the time smartphones became more popular. Even on desktops, which I think may just be because large buttons and text became trendy and although some may deny it, I think a lot of ui design is just following trends. It takes a good designer to not just blindly copy things because they look cool.

Large buttons and text were trendy already in the 20th century. There's only so small you can go on an 800x600 14' screen.

The crucial difference between then and now is the amount of whitespace.

The problem is these "designers" bring those touch-optimised UIs to desktop. And so you end up with hamburger menus on 4k-screens, tall narrow alert dialogs on MacOS etc.

Yes, and that is one of the reasons why your touchscreen UI must be radically different from your mouse and keyboard UI.