You make magic items feel magical again, not by making boring +N items essentially unknown, but by not using boring items. Anyone can make a boring +2 Flaming Sword of Swiftness. It takes an actual DM, using the most important part of DM skill, caring about player enthusiasm, to create something like...
"As you turn the finely-wrought lacquer-and-nacre scabbard in your hand, you realize that this must be an Arkhosian High Blademaster's sword. Drawing it, you see the curved blade within, austere in its perfection. The handle bears gold and mythril embroidery of cranes, the cross-guard lilies in crimson and gold, implying this sword once belonged to someone of a cadet branch of the royal family. After a few minutes of trial and error, an Arkhosian word that loosely translates as 'for blood and honor' sets the sword alight, the color and intensity clearly marking it as dragon-fire. And that leads to a second realization: though its greatest magic has faded slightly, it retains some final mote of the Golden One's flame, still burning after all these centuries. Karthedaas of clan Nyax, you hold in your hands one of the few treasures of Lost Arkhosia that remain, dimmed but not dulled by the turning of the ages--and now it is yours, to bring honor to your name and your clan. Or perhaps that unquenched spark may bring forth Arkhosia's light again, at your hand? You are not the first to have such thoughts...but none had the strength, or tools, or allies you have at your disposal."
That is how you make a magic item wondrous. You make it matter. You give it weight and meaning.
I actually have a different view from that expressed in both quotes.that has essentially nothing to do with the rules of the game. You could say exactly the same thing about any system: design good adventures of different types, and suddenly any game can offer a "general experience."
Adventures need to make use of the game's rules, but adventure design as a whole is genuinely a separate topic from system design. Hence why using a very well-made system cannot protect you from making $#¡+ modules (just look at 4e's Keep on the Shadowfell or Pyramid of Shadows, which were both absolutely awful), while a system generally recognized for extremely flawed design does not prevent you from making excellent adventures (just look at 3e's Red Hand of Doom, or the numerous beloved APs for PF1e, which even its own creators admitted was too broken to continue developing for.)
If D&D is bouyed by adventure design, all that that says is that it's had authors who could write good adventures--and enough market share to make writing such adventures actually worthwhile.
I personally don't find colourful description all that engaging. The way I make a magic item interesting is because of its power, or its connection to the PC's fictional position, or both. My 4e game features, unsurprisingly, lots of magic items. Some were purely utilitarian; but some had context and meaning, like the PCs' Thundercloud Tower that they first found in the Glacial Rift, and that they then (after having abandoned it in the Abyss) recovered from the Djinn and Yan-C-Bin. Some were close to PC-defining, like the Dwarven Fighter-Cleric's mordenkrad Overwhelm, the reforged Dwarven artefact Whelm.
My Torchbearer campaign hasn't featured many magic items, but the cursed Elfstone mattered not just because of its curse, but because of the way it linked together different characters and their convictions.
When it comes to adventures, I think adventures can be an important exemplar, or even constitutive, of system. Luke Crane made this point, some years ago now on a site that can no longer be found (by me at least) about B2 Keep on the Borderlands, which is a paradigm of classic D&D as presented by Moldvay. CoC is all about their adventures - the sequence of clues and events they precipitate, culminating in the sanity-blasting reveal.
And it tells you something about a system if adventures can't be written for it - eg In A Wicked Age.