Notifications
Good operating systems either lack notifications, or provide a means to completely disable them. Alas, many modern operating systems are not so good, and offer no way to disable the notifications, or might show a "disable" option but will randomly turn the annoyance back on again, as notably seen in that unusable OS, Microsoft Windows XP.
A modern macOS is pretty close to Windows XP in this regard, like how do you turn off the notification spam? Such as the "game mode!" notification every. damn. time. various games are started, how do you turn that off?
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/255171644
Yes, yes, there is some "focus mode" thing, but even with "do not disturb" turned on, all the time, and having manually turning off all the "let this app do notifications" one will still see random notification spam, such as from the game mode, or various other random things. This is much like every book coming with a little pop-up inside the cover reminding you that the book, indeed, has a cover!
Who are their target users that would need such frequent and annoying reminders? Goldfish, perhaps?
In contrast, EVE Online has a notification system, but you can actually turn the damn thing off, and do not need to jump through hoops nor disable critical system security settings to do so:
and EVE Online is hardly an example of a stellar user interface.
Hopefully Apple will get their act together some day and provide an option to kill all notifications dead, just as they got their act together and got rid of the touch bar (luckily I was able to hang onto a 2009 macbook through those years). If the notification system still needs to "be there" for some reason, maybe because they made the mistake of baking it too deeply into the OS, simply provide an app or daemon or something that for accessibility reasons can send the notifications to a log file (or /dev/null), which I can then peruse when need be (or not).
Windows is probably terrible here with notification spam, but I honestly don't know as I haven't much used it since Windows XP (thank goodness?). Maybe the notification spam can be turned off? If so, props to Microsoft for making that possible.
The modern web is very much terrible with pop-ups and other such needless annoyances. Ideally there would be a global kill-switch to turn off all such pop-ups, cookie warnings, and land mines if you hover over something for too long in Wikipedia, among other such nonsense and CPU wasters. w3m works here, assuming the site isn't broken with mandatory cookies and JavaScript like so many are.
Clock.app is also bad in modern macOS; it will, mostly, use the same sound selection, except when it randomly reverts back to the default. Disabling the notification system breaks Clock.app, but no great loss there, as it is better replaced with a very small shell script that does not ever have the bug of selecting a different alarm sound to play. One might wonder why a bad shell script is a better option than what a modern OS provides?
"There is no alternative"
Some may defend the pratice of spamming notifications with excuses such as "you'll get used to it", as if every Dairy Farmer could always magically adapt to the noise and the stress of the city just as magically as every City Slicker could always adapt to the cowpies and rusticness of a dairy farm. Some can adapt, while others will not, so forcing notifications (or cowpies, or the noise and light pollution of a city) onto those who do not want nor accept them would be a most dubious practice, especially when the whole fuss can be avoided by simply including a switch to kill notifications dead.