Wow, you can pinpoint exactly when design went from interesting to boring. (For me: 10.9 Mavericks to 10.0 Yosemite.)
Also, putting on a product manager hat for a moment: one concern you need to have in your role is creep: small changes accumulate over time into something materially worse, but where each stage is small and not excessively bad on its own. The graphic shows it clearly in the quantity of items on the Dock. The first version had 14: already quite a lot. macOS 27 has 22, and is very wide. I find it visually overwhelming, not just because all the icons have the same silhouette, but because there are so many of them.
Yet I bet the addition or removal of an app to the default Dock was carefully assessed in every single release.
Edit: check out this comment in the thread [1], where tkcranny states it more colourfully than I do :)