There have always been ui stinkers, but the early days of GUIs had companies spending large amounts of money treating usability as the major output of a serious engineering effort. Now, for all the talk about usability, the actual focus for most companies is on keeping up with the art movement de jour or with maximizing engagement or a similar metric that's only loosely related to usability.
And it's scary how often the developers themselves (in the widest sense of the word) don't realise this! They've picked targets and chase them without stopping to think that many applications are a means to an end, not an end itself.
But it is a difficult balance. One has to define metrics that tell apart "user doesn't incorporate solution in their workflow" (bad) and "user completes their work using solution quickly" (good).
