I've been around this industry for... a while. :D I remember in the mid-00's when people were doing high fidelity wireframes with Photoshop (or similar) or attempting to do the same with PowerPoint, and we all learned the lesson that a HiFi mockup is too constrained and causes stakeholders to obsess over details which aren't nailed down at that stage of the game. LoFi tools like Balsamiq came out, people learned to get the design concepts right first, using a tool that deliberately didn't feel like the real deal, and THEN move to HiFi.

Fast forward 10 years, and HiFi tools became easy enough to use that suddenly it seemed silly to use LoFi tools. Why waste time with Balsamiq when you can go straight to Figma, right?

People totally forgot that the lesson wasn't "use Balsamiq because Photoshop is too tough to use for this" (though that was true TOO), it was "LoFi mockups create a totally different vibe for the stakeholders and make it so they don't feel boxed in by the designer or the design, and they are less effort and cognitive burden to change early on".

Good article, it's nice to see I'm not the only one who remembers our history here.

J.Ja