It seems to me the common thread running through your article is the UX of new users. That is, all the examples you cite are examples of users who lack the experience to know how to change an album's name or how to find a particular setting or add an image.

Yes, minimalism as a kind of simplicity is always good: simple things are cheaper, more robust, easier to make and maintain.... Intuition, however, is based on experience. So to successfully apply intuition to a new approach means leveraging UX elements one can count on new users having already had. If the UI is sufficiently different from that other things, then users need to learn.

That's the element that's missing here: the UX remains the same for all users, but the users' level of expertise is dynamic.

In a perfect world, a UI would recognize a new user (e.g., possibly by the number of times a the user as accessed the system) and adjust its appearance and function as the user's responses change during the learning process.

For instance, in the Medium editor, all the little floaty bits that fade to nothing if you're not hovering over them would be always visible to new users, and then, over time and with continued use, would fade into the background.