No. The comparison I'm making is non-functional design vs. functional design.
Modern "designers" wouldn't know functional design if it hit them in the face and couldn't design one if their life depended on it.
> Do I need to see a list of every single application on my computer (utilitarian) or do I need to see the applications I use the most and added most recently (functional)?
Again, you're completely missing the meat of my argument while focusing on superficial.
The meat is: why the hell our huge 5k monitors manage to show less information on screen than 600x400 14" monitors of 30 years ago?
Your answer is "but scaling". No, scaling doesn't solve the issue. At best in modern designs you will see 11 items instead of 10. Where there's space for 50.
I wasn't saying that Win95 start menu was perfect. I was saying: modern start menu manages to show less information, and more poorly[1], on an area that is 10x the size of the entire screen available to Win95. And that this issue is repeated through the entire design of the OS.
[1] not to say more slowly, but that is an additional can of worms