One of my very first blog posts[1], which took off at the time on HN[2] was on this topic - in reaction to the trend of "horizontal page progress bars" (a.k.a. scroll bars!)

What's old is new again... and again... and again... :)

[1] https://bbrks.me/reinventing-scrollbars/

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6246777