Older versions of MacOS had an elegance to them. It’s lost some of that over the years.
The overall trend towards minimalism has ironed out much of what made it unique and it hasn’t always succeeded in improving UX. Even Liquid Glass and the ability to tint the icons (to make them even more indistinguishable) depends on the detail being kept to a minimum.
Yeah, what's amazing to me is that they play with the icon so much in an environment where they expect people to find the application by its icon. I always set up my machines so that I use a launcher that allows me to type the name of the program and then press Enter because I hate searching through grids of icons to find things, especially when the icons change over time. But when the company itself is expecting people to find things visually and then constantly changes the visual landscape, it just seems egregious.
It takes me several seconds to find an existing opened app when I hit cmd tab, it has been months already, I use my Mac for work, I know this stuff.
It’s not just the new design but also something else, like if part of my Mac lost its soul.