I remember when I was in college for game development. At the time Mirrors Edge was in development. My instructor for UI made us study it as the perfect example of a good UI. The dot wasn't so much a reticle as an anti nausea measure.

This was also a time where UI layers were occasionally just made in Adobe Flash (I think it was just after Adobe bought out Macromedia) so having a UI with crazy out of theme colours and issues syncing with the rest of the game was a real problem.

Designers felt the UI layers were often clunky, mechanical and in the way damaging the immersive experiences that had been becoming increasingly more "life like". It also saves a lot of localization cost.

I didn't end up in that industry but it seems like this became the norm for quite a while. Though I am starting to see better accessibility in game UI's games depending less on audio or visual only feedback. Which is good as we are all getting older.