Liquid Glass - with its wobbling jiggling jerking, shimmering and flashing, blurry and difficult-to-read, shifting and unpredictable design, and battery-demolishing performance - is so much worse. It's mindblowing how bad it is.
Commercial software coding glorifies denying anything older than 10 years exist outside of museums, let alone learn anything from it. The same has merely infected design world.
Now they just promote the youngsters that say the word AI a lot instead of those of us who actually care about the craft.
Is this known to be true or speculated? I don't know how this process is handled at Apple specifically, however, generally decision-makers are highly detached from UX. One would think that, especially for an overhaul initiative, "important" people would daily-drive dev/nightly builds to wear off the cool factor and experience the not so pleasant annoyances, but generally they shield themselves from that and mostly look at the "cool demos".
Regardless, as far as I am aware Apple has a tight product release cadence and ties feature gates to that. Obviously hardware readiness gates are much earlier than software, but I can easily imagine situations where "yes men" report "good enough" at gates relevant for marketing, feature gets greenlit, but then gets half-assed for the actual release. Recall iphones crashing at the initial release demo? Might as well be history rhyming.