[helmsb]

I think the issue is the incentives have shifted over the years.

A lot of software today is built to drive a specific user behavior to generate revenue instead of being designed from the start to provide customer value.

User-hostile behavior, dark patterns, etc. are all a symptom of this. Additionally time-to-market and marketing bullet points are often more important than user experience of bug-free software because many companies have found they can make the same revenue without having to focus on the customer experience.

Classic software was not as big-free as people like to think. There was lots of BAD software. The difference was that with higher prices and the inability to push updates (aside from mailing floppies) meant that the incentive was to produce software that had fewer bugs.