Part of it is that UX/UI designers are hired based on their portfolio. This imposes a bias towards those who can wow their interviews with flashy mockups/workflows on figma.
If it comes down between someone whose design looks like it came out of Win98 but has the information density of a terminal, and someone whose design looks cool but has the information density of a picture book, most teams pick the latter. Those same people go on to design the applications that get shipped.
The OP is right in that we lost the ability to design something like mIRC - the people doing the hiring value form over function.
I think a major part of UX design is that a lot of people enter the field thinking it's an art-adjacent field because they want to do something similar to art.
They often lose sight of the goal of usability in pursuit of their own aesthetic sensibilities. A lot of UX designers hate that the most usable designs are actually some of the ugliest/plainest.
Don Norman got a lot of blowback from designers, when he published The Psychology of Everyday Things (which was changed to The Design of Everyday Things).
He even wrote a sort of “let me explain” follow-up book, called Emotional Design.
But I am actually going through exactly this, right now. I just got off a Zoom call, with our designer, because the first batch of test users couldn’t figure out that there are action buttons.
Many designers want users to admire the UX; not use it.
If it comes down between someone whose design looks like it came out of Win98 but has the information density of a terminal, and someone whose design looks cool but has the information density of a picture book, most teams pick the latter. Those same people go on to design the applications that get shipped.
The OP is right in that we lost the ability to design something like mIRC - the people doing the hiring value form over function.