The whole system and apps are half-baked overall, filled with bugs, and obvious UI/UX mistakes. I do believe [speculation warning] there's plausibility in the idea it has been pushed by C suite, even against the advice from designers and engineers at Apple. It is inconceivable to me as a designer myself that they let so many amateurish readability and usability flaws, all over the place across the entire system.

I experimented with SwiftUI recently to get my hands in the Liquid Glass system itself, just by curiosity. Customization of the amount of blurriness is non existent at all, it is very hard to control aspects of it, super opinionated, bugs that had to be overcome with workarounds which didn't happen with previous versions of the toolkit.

To add fuel to the fire... nobody is talking about "the lack of AI" in latest macOS & iOS, and everybody seems to focus on the, overall, bad experience of Liquid Glass. So... if the strategy of serving as a distraction was true, it... worked? Not that I wanted "AI" personally (rather, I would love if they let people install any apps they want in their own phones they purchased with their own money...) but I can understand they having some pressure from certain segments of society and/or investors to have something, given the current state of affairs.