Boo, the finder is the worst thing to happen to UI because it is like pulling all the leaves off a tree and then ranking them in interesting ways. I mean, it's useful and great but at the expense of stalling development on tree/graph representations for the last ~30 years.

I mean look at this article - great writing, lots of good ideas, but not a single picture until page 9 of 10 and then you just get two lists and a card catalog metaphor. Whoo, dynamic lists. The problem with a spatial finder is that it's all about ordering things, which is a hideously constrictive thing even as a dynamic process because it reduces everything to one dimension and encourages quantitative rather than semantic thinking (let me be clear that I'm blaming Apple for this unhappy state of affairs rather than the author).

We can see another instance of this in the mentioned bookmarks; it's 2019 and the only options I have for exploring my bookmarks in any of the popular browsers are as a 90s style menu tree. Why doesn't my browser pro-actively tag my bookmarks and allow me to apply any of many categorical schemas that people share. Likewise, why can't I configure my browser to be more selective about CSS? It blows my mind that websites and apps offer 'dark themes' as a feature when theming has been a basic part of desktop UI for >20 years. I should be able to view any website through a dark theme whose darkness and basic palette I've chosen for my browser, in the same way that I can put on sunglasses rather than having to wait for artificial things in my physical environment to be painted in less vibrant colors.

I'm well aware that there are any number of CSS modifiers and plugins, I have used many over the years. But they all require either restyling individual website elements via a GUI or writing replacement CSS code. This is like saying that if you have an uncomfortable chair the solution is to take up woodworking rather than throw a cushion on it. I am never going to write code to increase my comfort (as opposed to developing new tools) because the discomfort of having to acquire competence with yet another syntax vastly outweighs the likely aesthetic improvement. It would make perfect sense if I was a working designer but I'm not and don't want to be. Invitations to code something oneself are implicit failures to understand the problem, confusing the cup with its content.

I submit that part of the problem is that designers and developers are hopelessly constricted by their own axiomatic metaphors. Take bookmarks; I still use physical bookmarks occasionally, and they're essentially nodes for a particular marker in a one-dimensional linked list (the sequence of paper pages in the book). The browser allowed us to take a collection of such one-dimensional markers and structure them in a binary tree form. That's nice, but by now we should be up to using quaternions to explore 4-dimensional slices in n-dimensional semantic space.

Frankly, if I were dictator of the internet my first rule would be that you can provide content or rendering but not both at the same time unless you want to be in an art museum. UI paradigms are like vessels into which content is poured; the web is the equivalent of having to buy drinks only in single-serving cans or bottles and then telling people to be happy with the huge variety of packaging options, with no regard to the time and cognitive overhead of trying to find what you want behind 500 layers of branding. Economists refer to this as the paradox of choice: little, no, or even negative value is being delivered to the consumer, while vast resources are being spent on trying to slightly expand market share through product differentiation. In some cases, far more economic resources than required for the manufacture and delivery of the underlying product and with significantly higher negative externalities in terms of energy and anxiety.