GGD wrote:
Here's my take on the cause...

There's sort of a hiring arms race going on in Silicon Valley between companies like Google, FaceBook, Apple, etc. They're hiring pretty much every computer science graduate that's available. So now they have a huge supply of developers who have never shipped a product and I believe that in many cases have never even used the many years of previous versions of the products that they are working on.

All of these junior engineers really wants to ship something, so they're adding new features that are solutions in search of a problem, and removing stuff that's been around for years since they've never used it and have a "better way".

In the mean time, the more senior developers have been getting paid well over the years and their stock is worth a lot, so they eventually move on and retire or start their own company, so there are no longer any filters to say "that's a really stupid idea".

It will only get worse...