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I chose win95 because it was the one you gave as an example. I wanna also point out that i remember time when floppy discs were still floppy, so im not completelly talking from my ass.
Also i mostly agree with you. But purely from argumentive perspective i wanna bring up few point.
Symbols are universal reducing the need of localization. This is usefull when lets say my mother who does not speak English that well is searching help with some setting. Its easier for her to press the button with a gear, than reading from the list and trying to find option that in her computer is "Järjestelmä asetukset" and on the website is "System settings."
Good place to notice how well visual symbols work are airports. No matter where in the world you are in international airports you can always wind bathrooms, exits, gates, shops and restaurants without knowing the local language bacause the symbols used at the airports are so universal. Similary now days i know to look for three dots or hamburger when im looking for more settings.
Thing to remember is that you and me arent the microsofts main customers. Most people using windows dont know anything about computers, and im willing a bet lot of money that MS have data of how many people use spesific menus and settings and that the now nested menus in win11 dont get that much of an use ie. Listing those are unneccessary clutter for most users.
Also i share your worry about kids gettkng used on mobile devices and having no understanging of basics of computers, BUT same argument could have been said when we jumped from text based operating systems to visuals, or when we jumped from punch cards to text based system, or when jumped from using cables to punch cards.
That makes us about the same age then.
Yeah, I am not arguing "all symbols bad", more than we are trying to push symbols where it could be questionable. Also these symbols still need to be learned: talking of my mother for instance, I absolutely remember having to teach her that the X was for closing the window, and having to do it multiple times. I don't argue the usefulness of the X over a "quit" or "close" button btw. Just that this has to be learned too. That's fine.
That's a bit of a chicken and egg situation though. Would some settings not be useful to almost anyone, even if they all knew about it? Absolutely, so it should be harder to access. Are there features that would be better for a lot of users but barely anyone knows about because of this? Certainly true too. And that's being charitable to companies, and assuming that they collect and present data as fairly as possible internally rather than use it in a way that makes a case for what they want to push... And yeah, we aren't Microsoft target, but I'd argue most companies share this trend. Even some open source projects buy into that when not necessary (imo).
And yeah, there is a good amount of subjectivity here of course. I think we (probably?) both agree with saying that making things simpler is not inherently bad, it's good even. I was trying to argue we are making a lot of things "simplistic" instead. As an aside, MS developing PowerShell is a form of admission that, for certain tasks, command line is better suited than graphical user interfaces. So yes, automatic jumps between paradigm could, and should, be argued on a case by case basis rather than blindly following it.