* Removed/reduced visual separation between elements
* Flattened things more
* More padding
A "proper" redesign then becomes finding the right and intuitive structure for the right type of content. Changing the appearance of the same content in the same structure is more of a reskin, which is what we see most of the time. And yes, sadly in the last years the trend has been: low contrast body text against an obligatory bright color for elements/illustrations/icons, rounded corners, and padding everywhere.
Designers have boring jobs under this regime, this their need to create unnecessary work and pain for users.
This is a cultural imposition, not something a professional would do. Yet, we have modern designers injecting their personal taste of modernism into UIs, in this case, Github developers are not the average Joe - they are familiar with complexity, highly dense information screens (code!) and don't need any of this non-sense.
Non-designers I've met actually have a better more grounded and functional approach to design, which is what I think design is. Yet the general opinion amongst designers is that the engineers are like Milton from Office Space - they don't understand fashion, current trends and aesthetics.
This practice should be applied universally throughout our lives in every field, perhaps except Art where creativity is revered and the avant-garde prevail.
They are also able to make payments using code scanning and normal transfer through the ease to use interface.
And this is in Myanmar, where we barely had internet for public use 10 years ago.
You wouldn't re-write a whole app without a very solid engineering reason.
But site after site re-does their UI without any stated reason.
For companies I've worked for we did new UI designs because they thought it would increase sales, even though it threw out all the sales optimizations we made in the last design. So, it was always a negative for sales.
It's just a big waste of money that upsets users. I understand tiny startups having CEOs that do it out of ignorance. But large organizations should know better.
I mean, you do need designers for whenever you add new features, and you want really great ones for that. But those really great designers want to do something, and there just aren't enough new features to keep them busy.
I mean, I don't dislike the aesthetics of the change, but yeah, I just wonder, "Why?" I agree with the few (what I think are relatively minor) specific issues that have been pointed out where utility has decreased, and I'm finding it difficult to point to any particular change and say, "Yes, this is better than before."
UI design is getting whitespace padding more rapidly than screen resolution is increasing.
* Added dark mode
That's kind of my whole point. Dark mode features are a symptom of UIs that no longer communicate anything significant with color and shade so just changing color with CSS tweaks doesn't break them.
Though you seem to be suggesting that's somehow a bad thing and I'm not sure why. Dark mode is so popular that operating systems have even started supporting a native toggle.
New GitHub looks alright on low resolutions, but looks kinda awful on big screens. This is the opposite problem old GitHub had.
Next thing I know, books will printed white-on-black.