Stumbled upon this from the Dial Box wikipedia page: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/noncommand/

[I]t may be one of the defining characteristics of next-generation user interfaces that they abandon the principle of conforming to a canonical interface style and instead become more radically tailored to the requirements of individual tasks

Not quite how it happened (this article is from the late 90s, i.e. pre-iPhone)