Rarely commented upon: It was Windows, with its horrific mess of user settings and sub-settings panels dating back decades, which introduced the idea of just typing in what setting you were looking for and pulling up a list of relevant panels. That was...kind of smart? If you're not going to actually go through and optimize everything? And then MacOS copied it, VSCode copied it... it became the default way to find whatever you were looking for. Need to fix the way your trackpad is working? Here: Instead of spending an hour digging through the mouse and input and keyboard and trackpad and accessibility and all the drivers for everything you own, just type in "speed". Okay, better.

The problem is that this doesn't really fix the underlying issue, which is the bozo explosion of footguns in the UI itself. In fact, it just papers over all the problems.

A good UI needs to be opinionated. And also, getting rid of cruft is at least if not more important than building any new feature.