Honestly, I think this is a contrived example. Picking another company’s app is a weird cherry-picked choice. Here’s (MacOS) Microsoft word, which is as close to apples-to-apples comparison as I can do.
Word 97 has a single row for each toolbar. It is very easy hand-eye coordination (anyone remember that term?) because the toolbars are very orderly and organized. It just takes practice, which most of us did.
Word 365 and its Ribbon bar has 1 row splitting to 3 rows combining to 2 rows splitting again to 3 rows and then combining back again to 1 row. And some icons have text, most don't.
Also, the menu bar doesn't fit and runs off the window/screen despite having less than Word 97's menu bar.
WHY?!
That is utterly hellish disorder and requires the eyes to scramble all over instead of moving along one straight line.
The WHY is because behind these tiny cute menu bar options lies kilometer long Microsoft Word 9x menus and submenus that became increasingly tough to navigate. It was clearly a UI element that was being pushed beyond its limits. This is why ribbons were innovated, combining the menubars and toolbars into one element -- a categorized toolbar with the flexibility of allowing common options to be larger than less common options, helping the eye in finding the most likely tools.
As for ribbons, you said it yourself "It just takes practice, which most of us did."
https://f.toi.sh/wordscreenshot.png
That looks perfectly usable to me. Not exactly 800x600 but it’s scaled close enough.