You might be thinking of this:
https://youtu.be/ZPUk1yNVeEI?feature=shared
Where he mentioned that the desktop is unique in that it has to support thousands of different devices for all kinds of people, and that most people don’t really care what their computer is running as long as it works.
Thanks for mentioning Photon! I just tried it and it has a much better look and feel than the default lemmy UI. Though I noticed that I cannot collapse comment chains (or don’t know how to), and on one occasion when someone posted a huge format video in the comments, the video was rendered over the comments below it, which didn’t happen in the default UI. But other than that, it’s great!
All in all I wouldn’t mind if this were the default frontend, I’ll probably keep using it myself.