The anti-minimalist backlash is the bigger story behind Oxygen’s revival

Going back may not be "the solution", but we can revert regressions without needing to implement perfection.

And even if one agrees about «the future that was promised» it is not clear that taking the closest thing and adding whatever is impractical not to add — while staying faithful to the original — is not exactly how you get to this future!

(Myself, I do however like visual minimalism, the urban design I like walking through is gray and beige plain boxes but with more street name markers than most places, I use a tiling WM with no window decorations, I configured both Konsole and Firefox to default to boxes with content and no decorations, etc.)