I find the whole yellow paint argument to be stupid. Back in the day, level design was so spartan, that if you saw a ladder, you could resonably infer that you could climb the ladder. Nowadays level design has become so rich in detail that you need a way to differentiate between objects you can interact with and objects that are just placed for fluff.
I love exploring the levels in some games like ‘Half Life’ and ‘Deus Ex’. One of my favorite gaming moments was when I put the hovercraft in HL2 up on the wooden platform three meters from the ground. Then I promptly fell from that platform myself and had to finish the watery level on foot, including running away from the firing helicopter.