UI standardised ?
I really have to take issue with that. Usable interface on Office up to Office 2003. Now all M$ produce is software with a thousand ways to meddle with fonts and not much else, requiring 20/40 vision. As for Android. spit, spit. Android devices or old Nokia would intuitive. My phones in last 10 years have become a source of intense irritation as standard activities like deleting logs of calls and SMS get harder to find. If there are UI standards, the old saw applies. Many standards to choose from. Most of them wrong. I can see why Apple devices are popular.
As for main intent of article, spot on. I have an early Pentium with Win3.1 that boots faster than lightweight Linices on multicore machines, early Office where documents and spreadsheets get produced very quickly. Cant relay on such old kit, but it is not frustrating while it works. Even grandkids Win98 box with DOS 16 bit games runs well with a fraction of the resources that i7 main PC uses to do similar basic office activities. In a past life I noted that applications developed in house in some Federal government departments hung around for decades because they "just worked". Their modern shiny shiny attempted replacements built by contractors never "just worked" and were incomplete after millions were spent. I wonder if some big organisation took on 6 COBOL programmers of the old school who did the full life cycle design and wrote code to do same as say, SAP payroll. I suspect COBOL code would be a fraction of size, resources and cost to run. Other languages may do also so long as it enforced strong data typing.
As for Oberon, maybe adapt it to a Pi or similar and see where that leads as young learners develop and move into workforce. Be a 40 year project