28 stores is small by UK supermarket standards. Sainsbury’s alone have over 1400. I can’t reasonably consider Booths reflective of trends across the country, perhaps for the reasons you suggest.
OP’s question as to whether the UK is rejecting self checkout on any level isn’t really addressed by the example in this article.
Though the BBC is obviously identified most with UK, it in fact has many international publications. This article focuses on the US, with only a reference to “Booths in the UK”, a very small supermarket group I have never heard of before.
Self checkout in the UK is commonplace and largely popular, though some of the general customer criticisms in the article are familiar to me as a regular user of them.
It’s been about 5 years since I’ve really engaged at all with most of Reddit, the API drama and renewed push to populate the alternatives seems to have achieved exactly what you describe. I even think the small barrier to entry for registering an account in the Fediverse is filtering people.
Many of us have been longing for something like this to happen.
It’s true, any developer in any space knows that core functionality is often built quickly, while refinement and beautification can swallow up enormous amounts of time.
Combined with my experience being that the dev guy and the UI/design guy are rarely the same person, and the former is way more inclined to create things for fun and give them away.
I use Feeder too, it’s entirely satisfactory.