It started with iOS 7 and Jony Ive
Steve Jobs was right. Then when he died (after removing Scott Forstall), Jony Ive got to do his hardware minimalism in software too. And everything Steve Jobs favored was suddenly derided as “skeumorphism”. It’s like what USSR did with Stalin under Khrustchev. I still remember when Chrome app just had a big white area where you’re supposed to enter the url and you had no idea unless you randomly happened to click there. And if the website background was white, too? Oh too bad LMAO. Minimalistic! Chrome had no… chrome.
I don't remember when I first encountered it (maybe before ios7), but their cardinal sin for me was my struggling for 10 minutes to make the calculator app go into scientific mode, seeing absolutely no setting for that, before eventually discovering from a friend that you have to physically rotate the phone to landscape orientation to get the additional buttons.
That reminds me of that notorious story of the adventure game from the 90s where you had to make a fake mustache out of cat hairs to solve a puzzle.
Gabriel Knight 3: Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned.
I was happy to find this Wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_hair_mustache_puzzle
Jony Ive is a plague on design. Just a few days ago someone showed me Ferrari's new EV that he designed. I am not a car person and even I can see it looks like crap! That man should just take his big Apple money and fully retire so he doesn't ruin anything else.
Windows 8 was released a whole year before iOS 7, so the blame here is misplaced (though I won't argue that Ive's approach to UI design was worse than what came before).