Related, I remember that what blew me away upon seeing the 3DS for the first time was not the 3d playfield (which looked exactly as I expected), but the UI in 3D. It really felt like a glimpse into an exciting future.
Minimalism is a very easy style to pull off because the fewer elements there are the easier it is to make them all consistent, uniform, simple. It takes the least time to get it right. It can be handed off to someone else without explaining any "vision" or guidelines.
None of this is to say it is bad. Minimalism is good actually. Just that minimalism isn't uniquely good. Other designs can be timeless, they just rarely are.
Sometimes though, "minimalism" in the Google web design sense actually makes the information much too opaque. The ideal design requirement should be specified as that which gives the user all the tools to navigate immediately. If those tools are a little complicated, in the words of Thomas Pynchon, "Why should things be easy to understand?" This is where I have a huge problem with iOS, just for example, hiding scrollbars on components that don't obviously look like they're scrollable - so users never realize that there are more options off to the right. That's minimalist, but it's less than the minimum information you need to use the software.
I keep thinking back to the winxp to 7 era (along with the various windowblinds/uxstyle third party skins), plus various furniture, fittings or tools/utensils/appliances from decades/centuries past (so antiques essentially). The physical items would have textures from the materials used and the processes to make them, maybe they'd be gnurled to add a grip, but also elaborations that aren't purely functional or just to make it look nicer. When you're familiar with those visuals they do seem to help you know what part of it you're looking at, and how it's going to act if you grab/click any given point.
Scrollbars are now an annoyance (when they're not hidden) as they're often low contrast and made to fade into the background, just another dull rectangle in a sea of others, rather than a distinct bit of UI chrome. There used to be a unique inline and small grooves at the centre point as I remember.
I'm not about to declare having the pendulum swing to the other extreme would be better, but it'd be interesting to see it explored again.
What you are talking about is economics. Its possible to deliver good results faster/cheaper and the result is more timeless. Also clean interfaces are putting function and content in front. Thats why companies choose this.
So dont blame the designer but the boss/manager. Its like saying that app is slow because devs are lazy.
My go to case and recent obsession is the NYC subway map. Here is the 1970s Vignelli map. https://mymodernmet.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/massim... Here is the map that has been in use for the last 40+ years. https://new.mta.info/map/5256
Designers tend to love the Vignelli map, but everyone in the city hated it and it was short lived. To this day you can still hear condescending remarks like the Vignelli map was "to abstract for NY". "NY choose the worse map". But its exactly like you said, first and foremost the point of design is to download information into brains, and by that metric the current map is far superior which is why it won.
Consider the background geography. Ardent supporters of the London Tube / Vignelli style insist surface streets are clutter full stop. Maybe that reduction of information makes sense in London and Europe where streets are a mess anyway, but in a grid city that reduction doesn't make sense. The present map simplifies the streets down to just a few representative examples so you know the local orientation of the grid and have a few reference points. Simplification, not reduction. The information is still there.
The coloring system is another massive example of simplification. The Vignelli map seems to hate information compression, insisting every line have its own color and own dots. The current map reduced clutter by organizing lines by where they run in Manhattan, denoting the express/local difference with black/white dots. Personally I think that symbol could be less arbitrary, but most people have no trouble figuring it out quickly. Its a simplification down to a single line which makes everything fit in a tight space while being easy to follow. There have been changes in service patterns which have ruined parts of the current map, but the very original version had some nice symmetry to it (and mostly still does). Even though the rule is technically "color by Avenue in Manhattan", that rule lined up with certain repeating "color zones", eg both South Bronx and Flatbush being Green/Red, Upper West side and New Lots being Blue/Red etc. You could sort of count on certain colors to be associated with certain broadly defined endpoints.
Perhaps, this example, being so utterly detached from the modern web design world, is one you might use simply because no one has any personal stake in it. Its a lesson designers should learn more often. Hiding and removing != simplifying. Good != pretty. Organize information well and its often close to pretty on its own.
(I have plenty of gripes with the present map but that's for another time)
Those designers were/are more illustrators than designers [1]. Design is, or at least should be, as much about the function of an object as about it's looks. A design that hinders functionality isn't a good design.
[1] I call the modern breed of such designers "Dribbble-driven"
Fundamentally, what makes design pleasing is super hard to reason about.
If it was mostly about repetition and consistency, any webpage that used bootstrap or no css at all would be pleasing. If pleasing minimalism was very easy to pull off, nobody would take note of Apple products.
Minimalism is a major factor for cognitive accessibility. If you build for the lowest common denominator then of course qualities like control must necessarily take a dive. If Google gave you more controls for search then it'd be better search, but then it wouldn't be as minimal anymore.
On software you have lots of room to hide complexity for the pro user, but that's not the case for hardware.
Those systems taught people how to use them, and didn't necessarily sacrifice everything to a series of wizard screens. I think somewhere around the point where design decisions started being made to help onboard people into a piece of software or hardware faster, we lost the joy of digging deep in the user manual and finding cool shit.
(I settled on a classic analogue Timex with a leather strap. Can't beat them, really.)
Pixes music starts playing as buildings explode
We'll have minimalism until a browser maker decides to make background: golfstream-leather('brown') and felt-cloth('green') work in CSS.
Who is this Brian you are speaking of?
(For that matter I don't know how I'd get it done for a professional project either.)
Windows Phone in particular was a huge breath of fresh air for me (rip) and Material Design a welcome evolution that I still feel strikes a decent balance.
Nothing looks as dated as "futuristic" stuff.
Other than this demo, the only 3D effects that actually work (ie 3D movies) are in VR