In the 1990s, it coincided with the proliferation of GUIs and their respective programming interfaces. Most frameworks use hierarchies like Object->View->Control->Button->ImageButton. Then people decided that this is the way for modeling abstract problems that don't have to deal with visual or real-world entities whatsoever.
And you would get nice automatic completion when doing object name, dot, and waiting for the IDE to list all possible methods. This was exploratory programming, the copilot of its time.