And anyone can point out a thousand examples arguing the opposite: that interfaces are becoming "worse", downgraded. Or argue that neither is true, interfaces are the same quality-wise, and all we saw was "sidegrades".

It's still treating what's a subjective matter of features as if it was an objective matter of age. It's all an "it depends"; you can't simply assume "newer thus better lol lmao", as the usage of "dated" implies.

At most what a designer can do is to say "doing things this new way will improve usability for $cohort1 but decrease it for $cohort2. Since $cohort2 is not part of our core target audience anyway, so let's implement it".

(I was going to include a bunch of examples but I feel like they'd make people miss the point.)