We live in the world of web apps and electron now, UI consistency is dead and buried because they killed it. Windows's UI mess is just a reflection of them hiring modern developers.
But I remind myself that in 1984, the idea of a visual interface was a little shocking to people: "What do I do? Where can I click?"
The Web kicked open the door and allowed all manner of UI designs. At the same time though, people were more comfortable navigating the breadth of UI by then.
I still prefer simplicity, consistency though.
...and now several decades later, I find myself asking the same question whenever I have to interact with a "modern" UI. Is it really that hard to make buttons look like actual buttons, and static text not look like buttons!?
'Modern develpoers'? What're you talking about, first of all, HN has weird trend of speaking as if Devs are these all-powerful artisans at their org when actually there's a Product Manager and a whole design org that makes these calls, Devs at best can file a recommendation and maybe get it considered.
Secondly, Electron is a business choice to minimize time spent doing cross-platfom GUI development. Can someone give me the list of cross-platform apps from back in the day with well thought out platform-specific GUIs? Cause I swear most of the popular Windows apps I used in the early 2000s like Winamp, Foobar2000, Notepad++, Soulseek, µTorrent, were Windows-only. Everyone's not just gonna run out and learn Qt, so tired of this low-hanging fruit type comment about Electron/Web Developers ruining everything. Go talk to this thing called the market instead.
The problem we're seeing now is nobody is willing to rollback bad ideas.
2021 the year of the Linux desktop? /s
Meanwhile, the rest of the world went full derp and decided that UI consistency is for boring people who like to actually get things done with a computer.
Microsoft found out the hard way with Windows XP that Win32 controls generally can't be rethemed in ways that change the pixel counts because they were consistent for so long that apps did all sorts of (sometimes very dumb) pixel-specific logic. Microsoft's commitment to backwards compatibility makes any consistency in theming Win32 controls near impossible without application developer buy-in, and buy in of XAML and actually adaptive layouts has still been extremely slow overall even if you can discount how long pixel-perfect RAD tools with zero adaptive layout support dominated early Windows development (including and especially VB <= 6).
The result: every program is different in appearance and behaviour.
Yes, system and default apps were somewhat consistent. But out of the box, a win9x installation was very poor with regard to installed software; you had to install more things if you wanted you computer to be useful. And the consistency went away.
While I agree UI consistency is dead even on MacOS now, personally I believe the Windows issue stems from them being too scared to actually push out full redesigns.
Look how vocal and angry people were when they started redesigning Settings even though most of control panel was designed for sub 800x600 resolutions.
This is why we're stuck with such inconsistency because they can never make sweeping changes without people freaking out, this is why we're stuck with things like that terrible device manager that refreshes the whole view and flickers 3 times when you plug in a USB device.
Really Windows should be pushing out a complete redesign and update of at least 2 of these apps every version. People will scream and shout every time they do but it's the only chance Windows has to completely modernize itself and get it up to par with Mac system tools and standard apps.
Its not that they modernized the old settings / configuration screen. They made a new one that does about 1/3 of the job and still links to the old one for the last 2/3. It does not seem like Microsoft intend to slowly have the new settings setup subsume the old settings. Nor do they seem to want to improve the old settings. Instead we are left with a weird stack of settings screens.
The big real complication is that data they have available on what is used 80/90% of the time is telemetry. It's not a coincidence that the people that find that the settings they use the most that haven't been converted are in the set of people most complaining about telemetry and most actively disabling it.
This isn't unique to Windows. It's a general problem. When something like network configuration or screen resolution had been a pretty stagnant thing for 20 years, you could just leave it alone or... spruce it up. Sure, it's always possible that there are better ideas. But implementing a change because you have a better idea is one thing. Implementing a change to justify your salary is another thing.