This is not a well written arricle. They mixes up material design with corporate memphis, which is not necessarily related, they can exist independently.
Their actual problem with google’s ux appears only in this paragraph:
The problem? Google’s actual UI & UX design is terrible. Whether mass-market or enterprise, web or mobile, its interfaces are chaotic and confusing. Every time I use Google Drive or the G Suite admin console, I feel lost. Neither experience nor intuition helps—I feel like an old man seeing a computer for the first time. I used Android for years (stock Android on a Nexus device), yet even after all that time, I struggled to distinguish buttons from plain text.
No examples, no reasoning, no good counter examples how it should be done, nothing. I’m not super familiar with google’s web ux as I only use search and youtube ocasionally. They write here about android, but no android screenshots in the article. So is this about web ux only? Or anything google? The author couldn’t even figure out what is their problem, this article sounds like “old man yells at cloud”
As an old guy, this is the dumbest line. Google drive is easy as hell to use. Easier than the PCs I used in the 80’s, that’s for sure
Google Drive is tedious as hell to use. The UI is utter garbage. Yes, eventually you can get it to do what you want but it is absolutely painful, especially with its background operations that are not reflected in the UI (e.g. you delete something large, it blocks you from deleting the seemingly empty shared drive until that background operation is done but doesn’t tell you why in the UI).
I feel like all file-like UIs suck. I hate Windows Explorer, Mac Finder, Nautilus Google Drive, OneDrive (yes I’m talking about both local and native file UIs but I dislike them all). Are there any that you consider good? Because I’d like to try it.
Locally I usually just use the terminal/CLI (on Linux), much more flexible and you can use scripts or specialized tools (like rsync or fdupes) for operations you need to perform repeatedly. GUIs just tend to be too slow and repetitive for my taste.
On the other hand Google Drive is still a lot better than that monstrosity you need to battle if you want to actually create API keys for any Google product so for my limited needs I usually just deal with using it every month or two when I really need to.