That was a lot of whining, followed by a vague, "we should do something sort of in the middle!" Ugh.

Anyway, "Guru Meditation Error" - Commodore, 1985. Cute has been around forever. Software has grown insanely more complex now than ten or twenty years ago. Providing a meaningful error in a concise manner is effectively impossible. Providing an overload of information does not help the end user deal with their frustration. The people at these companies are smart, I'm sure they've found user frustration and support costs are lower with a simple, cute error message.