Vincent Flanders fought bravely against mystery meat navigation - and all manner of other web desecrations - for 20 years with fewer and fewer people paying attention each year.
I imagine that by now web designers are so beholden to developers, corporate, etc., that they couldn’t pay attention if they wanted to. Flanders’ site is currently awaiting an update on the worst web pages of 2015.
OP, if you’re going to take the time to rant about X trend in web design, you could at least be bothered to provide even one example of an offending website (I realize others have mentioned sites, but it’s still extremely lazy of the OP to neglect that, and instead just say it’s “happening all over the place”).
Infinite Scroll and Lazy Load gave the Web a good bashing but the kicker was the infamously minimalist Fat Slab Style, crude and inelegant, derived from miserable old Swiss Style and birthed by an unholy union of Microsoft ( Metro ), Apple and Google, along with Ubuntu’s Unity.
It has made half the Web unreturnable, and finally the venerable old Internet Archive has succumbed against many, many protests during that grace period when they kept calling it a Beta — protests which like most objections to governance were deeply ignored. Not only is it hideous, but also far less usable. Which for all we know may have been one of the objectives.
Kinda like putting the planning documents in a locked drawer.
WTF is this obsession with rectangular Tiles instead of text links ?