I don’t think that’s it.
Once upon a time a Rolex was a serious tool for professional pilots and divers but now it’s a status symbol. It still basically tells the time but no one buys it for that.
Once upon a time a Mac...
By "courageously" taking things away from users, they frustrate older users who know how to do what they want for themselves, but Apple seems to be counting on a new generation of users who never learned to do things for themselves to be just fine with letting Apple do them. I always appreciated Apple's dedication to "quality", but the quality involved in computers as "bicycles for the mind" is not the Apple of today, where "quality" is about looking young, hip, fashionable, and somewhat wealthy.
Short answer: I'm definitely not young—I started on an Apple II in high school.
I do keep my software current and pay attention to things. I lived through 68000 -> PowerPC -> Intel, so I know how this goes.
I've been running Catalina since the late betas and haven't experienced the issues others have, other than my old Apple Keyboard with Numeric Keypad not working with Catalina, which is kinda annoying, since I really like the extra keys, etc. instead of the Bluetooth keyboard that came with the iMac.
Know what I did?
I submitted a bug report to Apple.
There's no doubt that Catalina (and iOS 13 for that matter) are more buggy than recent past upgrades, which is not good.
I don't think it's Apple not caring; I think they're trying to do a whole lot with overlapping groups. If the rumors are true and there's a 16-inch MacBook Pro about to come out and ARM Macs will likely become a thing in 2020, I suspect a lot of engineers are juggling multiple projects across multiple groups and this is the result.
I also switched to Zsh before I upgraded so I'd have my config all set before hand. So far, so good. And thank goodness for Homebrew and how quickly it had Catalina-compatible packages ready to go.
Wait, how hard is it going to be to keep running Bash?