A good UI can only ever have a limited number of discoverable actions. You can try to make a button for everything, but no one is going to try all the buttons, much less remember what they mean.

So you have to pick which actions are most important, and make those easy to discover. QuickLook is a wholly essential feature. So is navigating up a level—it's very useful in some instances, but the back button does the same thing 90% of the time.

For the rest, what matters most is that the actions are never activated accidentally†. This last point is, IMO, where iPadOS fails the most.

*

However: it is worth noting how far the Mac has fallen in the past decade. Snow Leopard had persistent scrollbars, that were big and blue so you couldn't miss them. Finder's toolbar had a button for activating QuickLook. And of course, the notification center didn't exist yet.

There's a pattern behind all these changes. Scrollbars were modified to match iOS. The QuickLook icon was removed to make room for a share button that mimics iOS. The design of notification center was basically ripped from iOS wholesale.

So yes, I agree that iOS has UI problems.

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† Unless the user can instantly parse how they accidentally triggered the action. If you can turn the accident into a learning experience, that's fantastic.

‡ It's still there, but disabled by default. So in terms of discoverability, it might as well not exist.