Everything has become a card. Open almost anything now — a feed, a dashboard, a shop, a news site — and the content arrives in small rectangles with rounded corners and a little shadow, stacked and shuffled into a grid. Somewhere along the way the card became the default unit of the web, and I don't remember deciding to reach for it as often as I do.
To be fair, it earned some of that. Cards are genuinely good at certain problems. They reflow across screen sizes without much fuss. They make a mixed bag of content types look like a coherent set. They give you a container to think inside when you don't know what the content will be, which is most of the time.
But a default is really just a decision you've stopped examining, and that's where my unease sits. A card quietly implies that every piece of content is roughly equal, roughly the same shape, roughly interchangeable. Sometimes that's true. Often it isn't — one thing on the page matters far more than the other eleven, and the grid has flattened them into even little tiles that all ask for the same amount of attention.
The tell, for me, is when I can't find the important thing. If everything looks the same, it gets hard to say what the page is actually about.
So I still use them, and I try to catch myself when I do. I ask whether the content really is a set of peers, or whether I reached for the container because it saved me from deciding what mattered. If I'm honest, most of the time it's the second one.