A lot of these redesigns share the common look of spacing everything out, which looks good. But I've gotten used to the compact layout of HN that lets me browse through stories really quickly.
Particularly the big annoyance in the latest version of UI/UX wave is the small fonts. I always zoom to about 150% and in instances where the pages are spaced out very little content is visible in one screenview. I just hope this phase passes soon and never comes back.
Don't forget small light grey fonts on a white background. I have terrible vision and have firefox set in a way that absolutely destroys websites in proportion to their trendiness (in order to make them readable). I'm still waiting for accessibility to become trendy.
To be fair, even places that should know better, like Mozilla Thunderbird and Valve's Steam client, are impossible to increase fonts in or are destroyed when you force them to.
And to be clear, I have 20-20 vision.