There was an economies of scale back then with OS-level UI components.

If Microsoft spent money on UX research that improved its UI controls, it would benefit a lot of people. Essentially the cost of that research was bore by all application developers.

The problem now? Every company is designing their own UI components. Every company has to bear the cost of UX research individually. It’s a lot of wheel re-inventing. UX easily takes a backseat.

I work on design systems for an enterprise software company. I was talking with one of the engineers on the team about how great it would be if there were better built in browser-based solutions for things like autocomplete, select and multi-select.

Are UI libraries no longer a thing?

They are, essentially the current mess is just a privately funded welfare program for UX designers.

I wish we could pay them to do something useful instead.

Are our software companies not greedy enough? Why do they waste money like this?

They are greedy but they aren't that good

As a side note: With the Internet (and myself) getting older and older, I appreciate the effort of the Internet Archive more and more. So many links I was able to revive thanks to a cached version. So many of my own works I was able to retrieve. It's a blessing, and not praised enough.

(Only ignorant fools would start to fight it.)

BTW I decided for my personal/hobby projects to look back to abandonware

and give them a modern touch or rewrite them to some modern language D/Zig but exactly.

I think this is what as a community should be also doing. It should be also a curriculum in universities.

Thanks to Internet Archive.