I suspect that without Jobs, Apple is dead by 2002. Turned into an arm of, like, RIM. Then Google comes out with the Android phone and it's all over for everyone including Microsoft.
This is the same issue as Prop 65, and while we can all say "oh the law is bad" the real problem is _corporations are lazy_.
Instead of making sure their products are safe, they just say everything is unsafe, because they know consumers will become numb to it.
Our food shouldn't contain allergens, and our computer mice shouldn't give us cancer, but instead of taking the time to make sure of that, companies just tell us the products are dangerous, because they know we don't really have a choice.
They have the money and the capability, but they choose profit over consumer safety, and that's THEIR sin, not ours.
The circular reference is because em and ex are relative to the font size of the surrounding context, and you need to pick a physical (or derivable-from-physical) unit for the root context. em and ex always refer to the M and x height because that's how fonts work in the old "lead type" world.
What she's describing is the acquisition of our ability to turn experience to story through the tool of language. Imagine a time when you were nearly black-out drunk. You were conscious, but you only existed in that moment; you lacked reflection or forethought that comes with the ability to abstract your experience.
She finally had acquired a tool most of us take for granted--and many of us still struggle to use, preferring to live in that instinctive animalistic ever-reductive singularity of "the present"--and it brought her up to the level of others who grew up with language.
It's unlikely that there's some mysterious level of self-awareness beyond that, because that's kind of what we're wired for.
I suspect several of your examples are very likely the result of I18N considerations. Some alphabets/ideographic languages are denser than others. So text areas are set for the compact-est common denominator, and icons are unlabeled for similar reasons.
Outrage that a company whose foundation is "laundering IP by running it through a complicated obfuscation engine" has created a product that is largely based on a critique of its own nature?
The only way they could've been more on-the-nose would've been to use Lucy Liu.
Let's not forget the loss of tax revenue, the loss of grain imports from Vandal-occupied North Africa to support large urban centers, and the rise of local Christian Nationalists in the rural areas who dismantled the administrative state to establish their own infighting fiefdoms.
That model of visual-memory-centered skeumorphism died in the 90's. Because for a majority of people, they get no benefit from persistent visual placement of content, or visual differentiation of documents, and can't cope with the "desktop" in REAL life, much less the metaphor that was "every desktop UX between the Mother of All Demoes and the death of even trying that was the iPhone" now people interact with the world through vertically siloed apps which all have different management models for content, and make it easier to charge you feudal rent on what would otherwise be your own possessions.
And what especially galls me is that if you suggest this "skeumorphic" model to OSS devs, they act like you're crazy. Even if it's something simple like "the Indigo Magic Desktop's scalable line art icons that had animated states". Suggesting visual interfaces seems to grossly offend people who develop software.