users looking at it will have a low impression of it
Mistakenly, of course. This is a well-attested problem, and is fundamental to this entire topic of discussion.
I don’t think fashion is the main motivator here
No, the halo effect is the main motivator.
you can’t make it go away just by unilaterally stopping playing
I never said that you could. (Although, in fact, I will now say that you can do so to a much greater extent than people usually assume, though not, of course, completely.)
The “earlier understanding” of many problems in UX design was more correct. Knowledge and understanding in the industry has, in many cases, degenerated, not improved.
How so? I can think of cases where earlier UX was a better fit for experienced users and newer UXes are “dumbed down”, is that what you mean?
In part. A full treatment of this question is beyond the scope of a tangential comment thread, though indeed the question is worthy of a full treatment. I will have to decline to elaborate for now.
If there was massive value destruction then users would move to software that changed UI less.
In practice this is often impossible. For example, how do I move to a browser with which I can effectively browse every website, but whose UI stays static? I can’t (in large part because of anti-competitive behavior and general shadiness on the part of Google, in part because of other trends).
The fact is that such simplistic, spherical-cow models of user behavior and systemic incentives fail to capture a large number and scope of “Molochian” dynamics in the tech industry (and the world at large).
To the contrary: companies that update their UI to be “current” probably, in general, make worse software (and not only in virtue of the fact that the UI updates often directly make the software worse).
Do they? It’s funny; I’ve seen this sort of sentiment quite a few times. It’s always either “well, actually, I like older UIs, but newer UIs work better [in unspecified ways] for some people [but not me]”, or “I prefer newer UIs, because they’re [vague handwaving about ‘modern’, ‘current’, ‘clean’, ‘not outdated’, etc.,]”. Much less frequent, somehow—to the point of being almost totally absent from my experience—are sentiments along the lines of “I prefer modern UIs, for the following specific reasons; they are superior to older UIs, which have the following specific flaws (which modern UIs lack)”.
But note that this objection essentially concedes the point: that the pressure toward “modernization” of UX design is a Molochian race to the bottom.
[emphasis mine]
I have a hard time believing that you are serious, here. I find this to be an absurd claim.
Once again, it is difficult for me to believe that you actually don’t know what I’m talking about—you would have to have spent the last five years, at the very least, not paying any attention to developments in web technologies. But if that’s so, then perhaps the inferential distance between us is too great.