I think with the cluttered thing, it really depends on what the app is trying to do. Sometimes it works sometimes it just results in too many taps to get where you want.

But you're right, there's this tendency to do minimalist design for minimalism's sake. I think it's mainly to do with the corpo influence on tech, especially with mobile apps.

Well I'm a user too and it certainly isn't very friendly to me when I have to go hunting for a feature you took away last week and hid somewhere.

At some point it should be punishable by law to change shit.

Like imo someone should hang for the slow steps Reddit is taking to kill old.reddit.com when people CLEARLY FUCKING LIKE IT AND PREFER IT TO THEIR FUCKING APP.

I've used old.reddit.com for years because the mobile site is just fucking garbage. And it just works, so much better. It's infinitely faster. The app is even worse than the mobile site.

Like all this fucking time and energy wasted on work making shit nobody wants

Clutter is a real thing, but it's something that's present all the time when it really should not be and is so in an obstructive way, such as ads, locked out premium features, reminders of premium features they want you to buy, wasted empty space, etc. In contrast something like a settings menu definitionally cannot be cluttered (at worst it can be disorganized or poorly labeled) because it's something that's rarely touched and which needs to be exhaustive in its contents.

So apps tend to be actually extremely cluttered in bad ways (because monetization is real clutter), while also being infuriatingly barebones. They're the actual worst thing and should simply stop being a thing.