I understand where you're coming from but dismissing it as a 'thing' is a bit cynical. I disliked the whole 'web 2.0' look, it was garish and rarely had any relation to things in real life. With more designers embracing the flat aesthetic, I think it shows a deeper development that design is becoming more humanist, and this can only mean users are more aquatinted to digital interfaces and no longer need high gloss buttons to understand an elements can be clicked etc. The move towards flat to me a great thing, a turning point in digital design.
I don't think it is cynical. This is a new trendy style. In 3 years, everyone will be complaining about flat design, hipster mustaches, and wishing we had more gradients and glossy reflections.
I would mostly agree with you that flat design is a new style if we limit the context to only web/application GUI's. No one can really disagree that flat design is an already historically established visual aesthetic in the real world.
So this is digital flat design. With digital there are different metaphors to consider, like user interaction, boundaries, display capabilities etc. This is the web adopting some of the best things about established design aesthetics in the real world (minimalism) and integrating them in an entirely new way to incorporate those considerations.
I agree that it is inevitable there will be some new design trend in a few years time (please hopefully not one that involves monstrous glossy buttons and gradients), however this current flat design feels like it is laying the groundwork, especially in how a design should be technically achieved. The flat design is naturally more vector, which makes it inherently more native to web technology (CSS, HTML). This is very different from previous web design trends I can remember which were essentially hacks, initially involving tables, and later divs compiled from static bitmapped assets exported from Photoshop. This I believe is a new chapter in the evolution of design on the web.
It's totally a thing, the latest in an incredibly long line of the latest thing.
Zeldman wrote this in 1999 and it's still true today:
"The web used to look like a phone book. Now much of it looks like a design portfolio. In fact, it looks like the design portfolio of 20 well-known designers, whose style gets copied again and again by young designers who consider themselves disciples. Distinctions between graphic design and communication design are lost on these designers. As is the distinction between true style, which evolves from the nature of the project, and derivative pastiche, which is grafted onto many projects like a third arm."
