Sadly, none of the links I tried work anymore. (Though the conversation in the comments where they have to explain how to open a ppt in powerpoint is internet gold!)

I was hoping to figure out what led to design incompetence so spectacular that people would still be discussing it after 17 years.

I think there’s a clue in the abstract: The author claims they made 25,000 mock UI screenshots, but doesn’t mention user studies or even internally prototyping some of the concepts to see how they feel.