Somehow, we’re still failing to realize that the most complex UIs - think CAD software, 3D editors, etc - are imperative, object-oriented, and written in C++. Their core development teams are usually very small. Yet you need a 20-person frontend team to deliver a primitive e-commerce app. It’s as clear as day that the promise of declarative and reactive programming is failing its users.
I think the key is these things were possible 20 years ago with small teams and now large teams and even teams at Apple can’t make competent apps with the flagship product.
I worked at a FAANG and a team was tasked with implementing a new REST framework to replace/augment the supported RPC framework. Metrics were very important and this team might have know HTTP/REST well, but they didn’t understand what operators needed. It wasn’t even on their radar. As a senior engineer, without much traction I complained and fortunately someone one level higher from across the company saw my message and had the necessary influence to get them to pause and think. I don’t know if anyone has done that at Apple.
Things that used to work universally - key bindings, drag and drop, context menus - just don’t work by default anymore. Why? Because now everything is some low level UI element and whose behavior is completely up to the programmer. Sounds like web programming, not like Mac programming.
From a programming perspective, I don’t even like the paradigm. Once understood, IOC in AppKit and Interface Builder was incredibly efficient.
No offense, but this doesn't seem like a realistic way to look at things.
Autodesk (since you mentioned CAD) itself dates back to 1980s. And even then, they had at least 15 people working on AutoCAD. That's a small team size. Today, they have over 14000 employees. Some random website tells me they had ~5000 of them 20 years ago. You can make anything work when you throw an army of people at it. It's not exactly a good point towards small teams being able to build complex imperative/OOP apps.
That's not to say that Apple is not dropping the ball here. I don't really have any Apple devices to check for myself, but I know that Microsoft, for instance, has been doing much more than just dropping the ball when it comes to UI. But, I'm not sure that has anything to do with imperative vs declarative.
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