To the OP's point:
"$HOME/Pictures/memes/PleaseDontTurnMeIntoAnOversimplifiedX"
Here is an example of that. In the olden-days a content management system would let you configure if you wanted a link to open in a new window (which became tab) or not. Now-a-days the content management system is thinking for us and making choices we may not want. To make the UI "simple" the option to make the choice is now off-loaded to a logic block that says if the link is external to the site it must open in a new tab. If you wanted an internal to the domain link to open in a new tab, there's no option to do that. The system is making a decision based on a generalization and not allowing you as the end user to override what it thinks you want.
The same thing is very evident in politics, distill a complex issue down to a sound bite and you've oversimplified everything so much that to disagree must be blasphemous. But I just want a checkbox to open a link in a new tab or not, how did we end up shouting "check-boxes are not patriotic" and joining a protest rally against toggles? BTW I'd be on the side that was waiving banners "I thought you wanted freedom?". My love of toggles and checkboxes must be woke and liberal or something equally dumb like that. I would think this rally would include "Libadwaita or Die" banners too but anyways, it's all ridiculous. How did we get here?
And you can't do anything about that, you can't configure that behavior, there's no feature flag to stop the system over simplifying it, there's rarely an "advanced option" in the UI to override the over simplification. It's an over simplification and the feature request to put it back to the way it was is ignored in the name of progress. It's their way or nobody's.
Not in Mint but the trend is to force things upon users. Some veterans can fight back, others are just left with something less useful than what they had before. It's "modern" ... but it's useless junk and even worse some of this stuff can be turned over to AI so now it's GPT3.5 telling you what you should want.
A strong and confident product direction is great, but the more they as developers isolate themselves from users or rely on data the more polarized the view of the product would be. If you don't agree with the direction the devs are taking you then have to fork and make your own path. That's how we ended up with Cinnamon right? To that end falling out with the developers view might be ok. If everyone could just listen to each other, wouldn't we be better off? Everything is so polarized and over simplified, and I sound old
… Specifically, we added these emergent aspects: …”
