You're describing cargo-cult. The mindless replication of form without consideration for function.
> But minimalism is a thing, it just has to be tempered.
Some people's view of minimalism is frugality for its own sake. It becomes an ideology that has nothing to do with the practical purposes behind the label, "doing away with excess". Excess is whatever is too much, redundant. The quality of something excessive is that you don't notice it when it's gone. You don't miss it. Minimalism is not about replacing a function with another noticeably more convoluted approach. My personal summary of being a minimalist is that you own all of what you need and you use all of what you own. A minimalist may decide that they don't own a fork because they can eat just as well with their spoon. If they can go months without noticing, it's a good call. The moment you see them contorting that spoon while attempting to cut their steak, they've lost the plot. Likewise in UI, the hard to find scroll bars, the greying of texts, the missing buttons are all being noticed by users. It's minimalism gone to seed.
In this horticultural metaphor, I sure hope we'll come to germinate a new and healthy UX maximalism, but so far, with rare exceptions few and far between, I'm not seeing it.
Even Wikipedia, long a bastion of the good old ugly, went ahead and introduced a hamburger menu, replaced the old global sidebar with the article's TOC (collapsed by default with "generous" spacing), and replaced the old right-hand TOC with...whitespace.
I assume you mean the "colored text might be a button to perform an action" thing, not drawing button frames on things like dialog box choices anymore?
I sometimes wonder if that is nothing but a cargo cult started by the dark pattern of wanting to minimize number of people clicking the "Deny" button.
> But minimalism is a thing, it just has to be tempered.
Some people's view of minimalism is frugality for its own sake. It becomes an ideology that has nothing to do with the practical purposes behind the label, "doing away with excess". Excess is whatever is too much, redundant. The quality of something excessive is that you don't notice it when it's gone. You don't miss it. Minimalism is not about replacing a function with another noticeably more convoluted approach. My personal summary of being a minimalist is that you own all of what you need and you use all of what you own. A minimalist may decide that they don't own a fork because they can eat just as well with their spoon. If they can go months without noticing, it's a good call. The moment you see them contorting that spoon while attempting to cut their steak, they've lost the plot. Likewise in UI, the hard to find scroll bars, the greying of texts, the missing buttons are all being noticed by users. It's minimalism gone to seed.