Excellent historical perspective on how we ended up with applications filled with annoying interruptions and notifications. It's been done indeed one step at a time and lead to poor UX really.

There is some truth to this. Moving some things to data brings interesting properties but it's a two edged sword. Things are simpler to use when kept as code. Maybe code emitting structured data.

Interesting analysis. It gives a balanced view on the possible scenarios around the AI hype.