This is actually true for Win 95 / classic Win UI. (However, you may want to reconsider the bevels, since the graphics tend to be a bit too heavy on a flat screen.)
P.S.: Many (including them myself) consider Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6.x) as the epitome of a UI, which matched usability, conceptual space and visual design next to perfection considering the visual and stylistic preferences of the time. That said, I can also see, even if I do not appreciate the road taken specifically, why this wasn't sustainable with high resolution displays.
> However, you may want to reconsider the bevels, since the graphics tend to be a bit too heavy on a flat screen.
They looked "heavy" on pixelated, low-res flat screens (lacking the natural Gaussian blur that a CRT gives you) but it's not like there was an alternative back then. OTOH nowadays, with resolutions, DPIs etc. varying so much, pixel perfect design is not the sensible choice that it was back then.
Flat design is just a bad choice, though. You can have softened bevels/3d effects in a modern design such as Adwaita in GNOME/Linux, and that looks quite good - perhaps the best feasible iteration on a Windows 95-like design, all things considered.
Mind that in the mid 1990s color CRTs still tended to be quite blurry, if it wasn't a Trinitron display. (E.g., dithered colors were next to indiscernible from solid colors, especially on larger RGB displays.) Also, pixels used to be much bigger (starting at 72 dpi, eventually tending towards 96 dpi with intermediary steps on multisync displays). With this kind of resolution on a flat screen, the UIs do not look how they used to look on a CRT.
> Flat design is just a bad choice, though. You can have softened bevels/3d effects in a modern design (…)
I agree. However, I can see why we ended where we are now. Also, it's cheap (as compared to having to maintain various resources and various color definitions for various resolutions) …
