The Decline of Usability
Some very good points here, I haven't been using Stack in a while and I can hardly believe they could come up with something like that! What a nightmare...! 
I can't fully agree with the rant about scroll bars: so easy to reveal them by just scrolling (easier than a mouse click), but a lot better in terms of aesthetic. Of course a compromise, but an acceptable one. I would rather prefer scrollbars on desktop to be larger, because they are not visible most of the times anyway, so why make them such small targets that are difficult to click on? 
The author seems to be critical towards flat design, what are the arguments around that? The emotional impact of design is not something that can be disregarded that easily, it's legit to expect a modern UI to be efficient and slick at the same time. Aesthetic is paramount, for the same reasons why typography matters. Users nowadays expect to deal with a clean, lightweight UI, rather than with one that looks like it was designed in the Pleistocene.