The huge UI elements are a consequence of optimizing for touchscreens.
Mice (and even touchpads) are very precise pointing devices compared to a toddler's chunky fist. Modern UIs are created assuming you'll be using fingers to interact with them. Mice are an afterthought.
I’m pretty sure what happened was all the UI started out big, and then high dpi displays made everything tiny, and eventually UI design caught up and made things legible again.
There’s no reason why I need 20,000 items on the screen at the same time. Fewer but more legible items are better. I can scroll for more.
> There’s no reason why I need 20,000 items on the screen at the same time. Fewer but more legible items are better. I can scroll for more.
I'm reasonably sure most spreadsheet power users would have the opposite preferences to you. I do, for one. Data density is everything in non-trivial spreadsheets.
No, high dpi displays did not make everything tiny and then huge. They just forced Microsoft to finally put some effort into making their UI scalability work properly.
Displays with less than 100 dpi are still widespread, and today's software and web pages have far more padding and wasted space than they did 20 years ago. A 21" 4:3 CRT back then was at least as usable as a 27" 16:9 LCD today despite the newer displays having twice as many pixels. 17" displays in any aspect ratio are frustrating to the point of uselessness on today's desktops, but were fine in the '90s. The UI bloat is real whether you measure in pixels or inches, and very strongly correlated with the rise of touchscreens.
Mice (and even touchpads) are very precise pointing devices compared to a toddler's chunky fist. Modern UIs are created assuming you'll be using fingers to interact with them. Mice are an afterthought.