> But it’s not like the designers are unaware of more information dense alternatives.
Strong disagree. I have been in UX reviews for products like Bloomberg terminals as the intended user. I specifically asked for information density and the designer looked at me like I was from the moon. Their counter offer was a permanent floating chatbot that covered the small amount of information still on the page. No joke. Information density is something those web designers genuinely could not comprehend.
“ You can remove the drawn-in borders just by adding a little visual space, and use subtle color differences to separate rows if needed” ———> “Let’s make it 10 rows per screen (and somehow still with low-legibility font choices and low-readability text design)! Make the design breathe, you know, white space!” ———> Me, having an aneurysm