The new System Settings is an obvious one; Sonoma hasn’t really touched that at all despite its glaring issues. But Notification Centre has been borderline useless ever since they redesigned it back in what, Big Sur? I saw a Mastodon post recently [0] that highlighted how bad it is today compared to the old design, yet it’s barely been touched in 3 years.
macOS is stable and established and unlike iOS a lot of people rely on it to do actual work, I would rather them not mess with stuff than half-ass it and leave it unfinished.
The settings app for example was perfectly fine, it worked well for what...near 20 years with only slight tweaks. Now I have to use the search bar for settings, because it's not obvious at all where to find a lot of them.
And yet things that would be useful like a volume mixer are still nowhere to be found.
Frequently these days, with lots of overlapping windows I try to click the top of a window only to find out I’ve clicked on part of the window behind.
Yes having everything one colour is lovely and ‘clean’ but horrible to use
Flat design looks much, much cleaner.
Same for iOS. iOS 7 was the first version that I actually liked looking at.