Instead, they did things like: just forget about proper keyboard support in a lot of places, have really awful performance at times, weird gaps where entire UI elements were just not there, etc. And that’s before even getting into the apps, where they were clearly doing things lazily like leaving iPhone elements in place exactly as they were no matter how awful an experience that was on the Mac.
Almost every app they have now should not have been released in its current state, much less left more-or-less-still-broken 1-2 years later! It is certainly possible to embark on major updates like this but you do that internally, only releasing something when it is not full of obvious flaws (and certainly not worse than some previous version it replaces).