This is nostalgia, you're remembering things as better than they were. Back then there were so many bad UI in software http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/shame.htm
Yes, there were plenty of bad UI's and they got called out on sites like that because of it. If you read some of those "bloopers" you realize that the functionality the guy is complaining about are pretty much the default broken behavior these days. For example: applications that don't honor system colors.
With some OS's you can't even have fine grained control over those defaults anymore. Dark modes have brought some of it back, so its better now than 5 years ago, but still worse than 20 years ago. But people pretend that having a dark/light switch is the same thing as being able to customize the color of just about every layer of the UI and have the vast majority of the applications honor it.
I suppose one way to save the situation would be to build libraries that allowed you to easily build tuis/efficient guis that interact with open-api or graphql endpoints? If there only was a way to encode the workflow in addition to just the apis it could almost be generated.
As you say the web is a culprit but so is attempting to shoehorn mobile designs into desktop.