Apologies if this isn't quite what the OP was referring to.
I'm unsure if the OP was referring to how we - the forum members - design stuff, or commenting on existing products? It also depends on where you're looking, I regularly browse hackaday, which is often full of projects that use raspberry pi's to do something a 555 can do - but then add a webserver because, well, they can. But those are one-off personal pet projects and it seems this thread is about consumer products.
I too have noticed an increase in complexity but... only in the higher-end (= more expensive) products. I suspect this is mostly marketing influencing engineering decisions rather than any utilitarian approach where costs are to be kept at a minimum to achieve the job and nothing more. Products are rarely designed for a specific purpose, but often for a price point. To justify the higher cost, there has to be more (or "better") functionality, and this is where features are bolted on just so they can be printed on the box, or mentioned ad-nauseam in the ads. Dyson I'm looking at you - they can charge so much for their products they can afford to grossly over engineer the electronics and that means they can make laughable claims in their ads which... plays towards their customer base who "loves gadgets".
So these days we have a much broader range of products, with a broader price range. The absolute top-end being somewhat laughable - like Juicero - that do have a market, albeit a small one. The low-end being what many members here complain about "chinese crap" where it is unclear just how they manage to achieve the functionality with such low cost parts/manufacturing. These are the extreme's with the middle ground being the most common, and products must navigate this - often adding/removing features purely to set the price point, because its the price that determines what people buy, not the functionality - because there are so many products that "do the job".
For personal projects, or even small runs, the "over kill" thing, does bug me, but I think I go too far the other way - often I will try and make something as efficient as possible, using logic gates for simple timers, and moving up in complexity if I need it, sometimes trying to squeeze out functionality from an 8-bit micro when a cortex m0 could do it without breaking a sweat. This generally means I spend way longer designing something that I should, honestly, throwing an Arduino at something that needs a pulse train isn't such a bad thing.
But that might be cause I'm an electronics guy. I started with electronics, so I started simple and throughout my career learned more complex systems. Others may have started being software guys - where a PC's resources aren't really that much of a restriction so one doesn't have to worry about a kilobyte array, or computational speed. These folks started off unrestricted, with huge hardware resources at their disposal, so perhaps it is further in the back of their mind when designing electronics. I'm not suggesting they poorly implement things, just that, they might start off using a very complicated system, and stripping it down/streamlining it to reduce costs, where-as hardware guys might start the other way, with simple systems, and adding on or upgrading as-and-when it is required.
If there isn't sufficient pressure to reduce complexity, like power consumption for longer battery life, reduction in size for wearables/portability, some personal projects, and even products, might remain more or less on the hardware they were prototyped on. That could be a beaglebone, raspberry pi, SBC, some poor 32-bit micro running python. And if one uses hardware that is hardly taxed at all, well.... we have plenty of room for extra features. Again, this can be a good thing, and sometimes means one finds a feature incredibly useful that was only added for shits'n'giggles. But sometimes it gets in the way of the original intended purpose.
Lastly, there is the very simple idea that more features/more complex = "better". Adding more bells and whistles to a product invariably makes it look more expensive, which again drives us consumers more than we would like to admit. Few people are truely utilitarian, as much as we would like to thing as much, although engineers more than most!
Examples? Hmm I think many internet-of-things have been mentioned. I'll forgo ranting about marketing wank (I do it too often in this forum).
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