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This! This is my exact experience (well, with Mac:s and Amiga:s). My father introduced courses in Desktop Publishing and Digital video editing in the late eighties and into the nineties in his county school. He understood computers to such a degree that he could successfully teach others to use them.

He is older now, still fully cognizant and lucid and gladly aging has not taken its toll yet, but he has mostly given up on computers for the very reason you write about so well -- interfaces became more and more fractured.

Things are not where they ought to be, they look different across different applications on the same operating system, they behave in different manners, and all these idiosyncrasies add up quickly, so he resigned and became mostly a consumer of content rather than a user or creator of such. He still has an old PowerBook (next to his modern M1 one) with an old copy of Adobe Illustrator as a poor man's CAD to draw and print things like cable installations and load-bearing sections of walls. It saddens me because he has such a great talent.

While we came to where we are today as mostly a slow decline, I would say it was a two-punch combo that finally broke user interfaces for good: First the complete annihilation of skeuomorphism in favour of design without any cues whatsoever, it might have looked ugly and certain abstract concepts might not have mapped well to the semantics of the physical world, it still offered a clear distinction of what was "interact-able" and what was not. And second, the introduction of Electron-type applications finally ended it.

I'm not sure there is a way out of this hole, so I am mostly resigned to not complaining to developers of apps like the original author either. Because what good does it do?