Nostalgia of old out of touch PC users(of which I am one; old I mean, not out of touch ;-)).
I doubt people under 25 years old today have the same attraction to desktop UIs from before they were born and think that's the ideal usability goal for daily driving today.
I think that really depends on whether they use PCs at all, and what for. I wouldn't dare to generalize people's habits based on age (the American "Gen*" labels never made much sense, and is usually downright discriminatory in both directions).
E.g. one result of the downward spiral of desktop UIs is that at least a lot of devs seem to have moved back to the command line, and the most hilarious thing of all is that the most modern tools (e.g. LLM frontends like Claude Code) are 1980s style TUIs. e.g. that's how bad the modern graphical user interfaces are failing us, we have to bring back half a century old UI technologies ;)
I wasn't generalizing. Your GP was doing that assuming everyone must thinks Win 98 UI as peak. I tried to provide a counter that people who used modern operating systems and never used Win 98 (because they're too young to have ever used it) might not find it usable today, and it's mostly rose tinted glasses nostalgia talking of the older people, who grew up with win 98 but they don't actually use it today. I also used win 98 back in the day, and yeah it looks clutter free, but too many modern QoL features are missing from it for me to actually daily drive it today.
Like for example to launch a program in Win98 you need to either have a desktop shortcut or click the start menu and then navigate a massive directory tree hovering the mouse pointer level by level and don't move your mouse by accident outside or the tree collapses and you need to start over, compared to any modern OS UI where you can access a global launcher via the meta key and just type what you need:an app, a setting, etc. Nobody can claim with a straight face Win 98 does this better than today.
>a lot of devs seem to have moved back to the command line
That's because thanks to AI development, TUIs today are 1000x more user friendly than they were 5-10 years ago, let alone in the 80s. And that's also ignoring the massive popularity of things like VS Code. Also TUIs are more popular today since more development today is done remotely via SSH on cloud instances rather than locally on the machine.
Age has nothing to do with it. Gnome 3 is just bad.
Where did I say it had to do with age? I said win 98 UI taken verbatim wouldn't be very usable today, especially for the younger generation who didn't grow up with it to think it's peak UI, as the older people who grew up with it are influenced by nostalgia but they also wouldn't be productive with it today compared to modern KDE for example.