It took me a while to warm up to "flat design", but now I can't ever see myself (or the industry) going back. By allowing the interface to recede, you allow the content to shine. Generally you want to focus on the document, the photo, the text, the movie -- not the controls around it.
But a simile comes to mind: The whizz-bang interfaces were like illuminated manuscripts. Beautiful. Works of art. Literal human artistic treasures.
But when I’m reading an email, I do not need dragons curled around drop caps.
I might actually bother to read such an email.
Our minds are pretty good at focusing on important stuff. We don't need white margins for that. We can focus on important stuff even with non-white margins. And those non-white margins might actually bring some joy when you can't focus anymore, because brain focus is finite.
There's no way for industry not going back. It'll go back. It always did. We move in spiral. We just need to completely forget how good skeuomorphic interfaces were, so companies will sell those again. Probably executed much better.
Then I must be GPT model because those non-functional things are way too distracting.
Jokes aside, I hated the page animation. It was amusing for the first minute but it felt weird to interact with it. Sticky is the only word that comes to mind, but not quite that. Glad it's gone.
Design is about solving human problems and helping humans accomplish things, not about how it looks.