It's hard to disagree, but I think the problem is more fundamental: way, way too many people working in tech assume that because Google and Facebook and Apple and Microsoft are huge and financially successful overall, that means they know what they're doing and should be emulated.

This has been true in recent years with the trendy but awful design. It's not just the typography. The obsession with flat design and giving up all the distinctiveness and affordances of other styles might even be worse.

It's also been going on for a long time with assuming if Google says it in its guidelines for webmasters then it must be good, as opposed to being good for Google's search engine.

It's even going on with software, specifically the various libraries and tools these organisations produce. Some of those libraries and tools are competently executed, but few are as remarkable or transformative as the hero worship might suggest.

This culture of emulation naturally leads to the kind of bland, homogeneous, poorly conceived work that is all too prevalent in our industry today. How could it not?

Ironically, I was just reading another HN post about a jobs board for older geeks, and the related discussion about the endemic problem with ageism in our industry. What we are talking about in this discussion is literally what happens when you hire a bunch of very young, very inexperienced, very untrained people, given them very snazzy hardware for their very good eyesight and their very dexterous hands to work with, give them effectively unlimited resources but very limited accountability and management, and leave them to run the show.

Anyone who wants to do better certainly can do it, just by studying relevant fields like graphic design and usability and by acquiring the necessary skill and experience (or, for businesses, by hiring people like that). But unsurprisingly, the people who are willing to go against the grain tend to be those who have been around for long enough to have other ideas and to have seen the same sorts of mistakes made before, and who wants to listen to them when you can go watch someone from the Apple team wax lyrical about their new barely legible font, someone from the React team misunderstanding basic MVC, or someone from Google who has never run a small business web site in their life telling everyone what makes good quality content?