It's unfortunate that life these days is seemingly constantly choosing from the least of all evils. Let's just start with something fairly popular, then ease into something more esoteric.
I believe there are quite a few people who do not particularly like Donald Trump; I really am one of them. He is often well-meaning, but the presentation is very unpolished and quite rough. Still, it's tough to argue with the results. I generally liked the course of the USA from early 2017 to early 2021. I learned my lesson from 1992 though. I really thought the best thing for our country was H. Ross Perot, so I voted for him. My second choice would have been George H. W. Bush, and my last choice was Bill Clinton. Effectively, I believe Perot drained away far more Bush votes than Clinton votes, ergo Clinton won. As I believe CGP Grey amply demonstrated though, first-past-the-post voting, as we have in the vast majority of the US, ultimately and unchangingly devolves into two (and realistically, no more than two) party voting. So despite the voting system supposing to be affirmative, there are quite a few people who cast their votes "against" someone, in my case against Joe Biden. Trump is just the lesser of two evils, not the best person for the job. In my opinion, Vivek Ramaswamy would be that, with Ron DeSantis an extremely close second. However, voting for anyone other than the Republican nominee to me would be counterproductive, as was the case in 1992.
To delve now into the more esoteric, I'm finding the same ultra-depressing issue with UI/UX design these days. The most frequent offenders are Web sites. As a stellar example, the Web is almost exclusively the place where you will find menus which will pop strictly because one places one's pointer over the top level item. I can't think of a single desktop program (which is not based on a Web framework, like Electron for example) which does not require a click to activate a menu. To me, that is the only sane way to roll, because I'm tired of randomly moving my pointer/cursor around a Web page, only to have the content I'm ATTEMPTING to view being obscured by a popup. I also loathe having to navigate these monstrosities, because the slightest deviation from the exact path needed for the next level very often causes the menu to un-pop. How people with even worse motor control than me are supposed to navigate these sites is way beyond me.
Another fairly common "sin" is obscuration of content until :hover, which is actually the trigger causing me to start writing this post. Once again, some Web designers seem to think it's a useful thing to obscure content which has to be randomly divined by the happenstance of placing my pointer within these objects. Even if I randomly discover one of these "hidden gems" on the page, I'm supposed to somehow infer that there are other elements somewhere on the page which serve the same purpose, but are likewise hidden until I move my pointer. It's not as if this space were used for some other purpose that these elements are hidden until "hovered;" no, the Web designer figures I'll just magically "figure it out." For these people, I refer you to cognitive workload, which, had you not done this, would be less.
Another somewhat surprising UI/UX blunder is constantly "shouting" at people that they are wrong. You would think people would not take too kindly to constant correction, yet it is getting disturbingly common for form designers to shout at you nearly continuously with often red error messages until form fields are filled in with "correct" text. And I put "correct" in quotes because a fairly common mistake is email address validation; you can be putting in a totally correct, perfectly working email address such as john.q.public+homedepot@gmail.com yet their parser will claim all day long that the LHS cannot possibly have a "+". If it were a person sitting next the user constantly saying "wrong!" on every keypress, I doubt such a person would be tolerated by most for very long at all.
With me, those three are probably the most egregious of the UI/UX mistakes, but there are plenty more. Don't even get me started on almost all animations, which are more "look, Mom, see what I can do?" than anything else; they add nothing for me except annoyance and waste my time. Carousels are another stupidity; they frustrate all but a narrow few who read near the pace of the designer; for those who read (and comprehend) quickly, they're too slow, and for those like myself who read more slowly than average, the slide is changing before I can even read all of it.
For all that is holy and sacred, can you PLEASE not make the title of your sign-in page "login?" Do you not know there are several password managers which can select an entry based on the window title? So if your site shows just 'login," how is that supposed to be distinguished from the 50 other sites which were similarly not at all creative?
Today, I simply wanted to find a site which will sell me some eyeglasses, preferrably at an affordable price. But one by one, as I'm going through Google's results, each site has one or more of these stupidities. To a certain extent, I can use browser extensions like uBlock Origin, Tampermonkey, or Stylus to modify how these pages look or behave, but there comes a point on each where I find myself saying to myself, this isn't worth the effort, let's move on to some other site; there HAS to be a sane one somewhere. But alas, surely as COVID-19 spread around the entire world, UI/UX stupidities are infecting nearly every Web site.
Some so far are immune. Discover Card for example is actually fairly well thought out, for example requiring clicks to pop menus. I shudder at the thought that one day this will be taken over by Capital One and be ruined.
A sad counterexample is Western Division Credit Union, or more accurately, their subcontractor itsme247. One of the reasons I became and have remained there was the simplicity of the site, no animations, no menus popped for just hovering over the lead, nice, clean, sane design. But alas, someone somewhere within the company must have gotten infected, and the UI/UX went downhill very quickly. The cognitive load went up considerably (let's see...was Bill Pay under "move money" or "member services"?). Menus now pop just for putting the pointer over them. Heaven help you if your hand (or thumb on a trackball) wanders too far so that your pointer is not on the popup, it will un-pop. Worse still, there are SOME menus which DO pop only when clicked, such as the accounts list, where it asks what you want to do with that account.
So...after describing all this, what do I have to do? I am just worn down, sick of trying to compensate for the escapees of the mental asyla who design these pages. Instead of choosing one I can enjoy, I have to choose one which offends me the least.
English is a difficult enough language to interpret correctly when its rules are followed, let alone when the speaker or writer chooses not to follow those rules.
"Jeopardy!" replies and randomcaps really suck!