They have a point, though. In my honest opinion, more than 50% modern apps and services I've used - including e.g. Spotify, or pretty much every e-commerce site - have UI/UX strictly inferior to that of MS Access. Less functional, less ergonomic, less integrated, less useful.
A lot of UI and design work that people think is creative, making a positive contribution, is actually spending millions of dollars on removing and reducing value delivered to the users relative to cheaper or near-free alternatives.
Sometimes it's even funny. How many startups are explicitly or implicitly trying to be a replacement for some internal Excel spreadsheet? How many of them realize that their offering would work strictly better if it was distributed as an Excel spreadsheet or plugin instead of an SPA?
But it's not about utility, it's about control. Driving users through funnels, putting them on flows that minimize actual creative or maintenance work for you, locking them in and bleeding dry with subscriptions.
I think web browsers need to get back to basics and do their original job as "The User's Agent" rather than what they are today: Instead of being a tool to fetch and display hyperlinked text, they've morphed into this API platform built for web companies to control down to the pixel what users see in their browser window.
Today browsers barely give you a few blunt tools to control your own browsing experience: Javascript on/off, Styles on/off, and so on. I want a browser that 1. fetches YouTube's HTML, 2. understands it to be essentially a bunch of links to video URLs, and 3. present me a simple list of those video URLs that I can click to watch or download. I don't want my browser to act against me by being a platform where YouTube executes god-knows-what on my system to render everything the way YouTube wants and to show me things that YouTube wants and push content that YouTube wants to push. Put the user back in control.
Same for Reddit. Browser should fetch Reddit's HTML, realize it's essentially a list of links, and simply display those links, ignoring all the other shit that comes down in the site's HTML, CSS, and JS.
I realize that step #2 above is hard and probably magic at this point. But that's the direction I'd like to see browsers go. Stop adding even more APIs that companies can use to control my browser.
If you do much mobile dev, you'll see companies burn so very much money making their app harder to use, possibly less accessible, and slower to develop, in the name of chasing some "on-brand" look, rather than just using built-in excellent UI elements that users are already familiar with, with minimal customization.
It's so frustrating. The Web, of course, has a similar but much worse problem with that, in no small part because there aren't—for no good reason—excellent built-in UI elements. They could be good, and there could be a lot more very helpful more-complex and smarter elements (think: mobile listviews, native hands-off payment prompts, that kind of thing), but they're not and there aren't :-/
Damn near every app on my phone would be better if the designers and brand-obsessed product managers hadn't gotten their way.
As for myself, I'll just stop using Reddit (largely have over the last year), and do something else with the free time.