Not a designer, but by digging around in the Twitter thread, it looks like Facebook adopted this visual style in 2017 [1], and pretty much everybody else followed suit.
It's always like this. Some company puts out a new, carefully thought-out "look and feel" that feels fresh. Then the literal rest of the world, instead of actually studying why the new thing works and how it can be adapted to other context, starts flooding the world with quick copycats. See, e.g., BMW's "flat design" logo [2], or the "Web 2.0" aesthetics of pointless reflections and glassy UI elements.
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Not a designer, but by digging around in the Twitter thread, it looks like Facebook adopted this visual style in 2017 [1], and pretty much everybody else followed suit.
It's always like this. Some company puts out a new, carefully thought-out "look and feel" that feels fresh. Then the literal rest of the world, instead of actually studying why the new thing works and how it can be adapted to other context, starts flooding the world with quick copycats. See, e.g., BMW's "flat design" logo [2], or the "Web 2.0" aesthetics of pointless reflections and glassy UI elements.
[1]: https://www.buck.co/work/facebook-alegria
[2]: https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/4/21163766/bmw-new-flat-logo...