[gjvc]

This article takes many words to say very little. If anything, "style" in software peaked in the public mind with the rise of Mac OS X in the early 2000s where the Aqua theme was juicy, looked like you wanted to lick it, and combined with things like the genie animation gave Mac OS X a wonderful sense of character. (Probably peaking at 10.6/Snow Leopard.)

This character has been systematically removed from the system since then, with successive updates since Apple began, lemming-like, to follow some "thought" "leader" in "design" believing that flatness in UI design was somehow "modern" and innovative. (The irony is that the flat buttons use less CPU/GPU power to render than the shaded three-dimensional ones which preceded them, something of which we now have orders of magnitude more.)