I agree and I wish I had insight into what exactly is going on inside Google. A couple of hypotheses:<p>1. Someone (or a group of people) within mistakenly believes this design aesthetic[1] is good and have gained a lot of political power. I guess they like things that look pretty in screenshots instead of things that are actually useful or intuitive?<p>2. They&#x27;re heavily optimizing for some metric (engagement, user growth, whatever) that is orthogonal to (or has a small component along) the usability vector.<p>[1] Simplistic defaults, not easily configurable, flat, tons of whitespace, etc...