Like, I would naively assume that the arrows would move your selection up, down, left, right, and one of the extra buttons would be "select/confirm" and the other would be "escape". But no, that would be too easy. Depending on exact position in the menu, sometimes the right arrow, sometimes the first extra button, and sometimes the second extra button selects the highlighted thing. Sometimes up and down arrows increase the selected thing (e.g. volume, brightness) and you need to press one of the extra buttons to stop doing it. Sometimes one of those extra buttons acts as a hotkey that will switch you to a completely different menu, so it will take five minutes to navigate back.

Then sometimes a confirmation windows opens, with two buttons "yes" and "no", one of them is pink and another is light blue, if you press any of the four arrows, the colors switch, and you are free to make your guess whether pressing the extra button will confirm the pink option, confirm the light blue option, take you to a completely different place, or turn off the menu.

That's a little hard to believe. Nothing is hidden on a VCR. There's input connections, a tape, and a big record button. At most there is an additional source button to choose the input source. It's all there, in the open, and not hidden.

Today's interface design is really all over the place. There's just too much stuff hidden and inconsistent. The source of this is our ever increasing reliance on software. If one thinks of writing software as both storing knowledge and communicating with people, it makes sense why software experiences are so bad. Communication and knowledge transfer are in general difficult processes, and now we've automated them at scale but hurried and botched them. Something even more is lost in translation. When we use a software-based product, we're experiencing all the stored miscommunication embedded in the device.

Warframe is the THE game I can think of doing this most. Even when I learned how it all worked, I needed a bunch of reference tables/posts so I could grind with maximal efficiency!

Nowadays, if a game has "crafting" I am 90% inclined to skip it.