As much as I’m agreeable to your general observation, I feel WordArt is a really poor example to illustrate your point: few software features have had such an aesthetic, meaningful, and human impact in the course of the Internet Age.
Oh how I yearn for a world of Geocities and FrontPage over Admiral anti-ad-blocker and GDPR cookie popups.
Yeah it's a baffling example to me. WordArt was really popular! People liked using it! The fact that it has aesthetically gone out of favor, years later, has nothing to do with software quality.
Oh how I yearn for a world of Geocities and FrontPage over Admiral anti-ad-blocker and GDPR cookie popups.