Thank you so much for writing this. I'm also from the desktop era and I can't STAND all the reinvention going on, or the fact that I have to move the mouse all over the screen or randomly stab my phone with my finger to find out what I can interact with.
I'm working on a GUI app and a web app in concert right now. They work in the same niche, but at different levels (one is desktop-level management, the other is enterprise-level management). I stepped back and developed a unified design language (Tela Design Language, or TDL) which has saved my sanity and made the apps actually usable again.
https://parkscomputing.com/content/tdl-reference.html
https://github.com/paulmooreparks/tela/blob/main/TELA-DESIGN...