My understanding is that's the cause of the additional turbulence you see these days, since they glide into land rather than stepping down to avoid turbulence. I think they also have planes more tightly packed now subjecting you to more wind vortex from the other planes.
Commercial airlines don't shut off their engines and glide to land. ATC usually directs them to step down their altitude from cruise in increments until they intercept a cleared approach. Then they make a smooth, continuous descent with minor variations in power to stay on the assigned slope.
The levels were picked to provide the customers a comfortable ride, based on reports from other planes and whatever other sources they have.
They have since been told to save on fuel and so don't do this, not "gliding" but lowering the thrust to save fuel when descending which exposes people to the rougher air for longer periods of time.
Please correct my understanding if this is not the case.
That said I think there's some terminology mix up. The path of the aircraft is taking when making a landing (the slope the poster is talking about) is called the glidepath. It's got nothing to do with the engines or the aircraft type.
The stepping down might be the pattern used as the plane is being maneuvered to line up with the runway but AFAIK those are just to setup for landing rather then being a part of the actually landing itself once the controller clears the pilot land.
Which is called a "glide path" or "glide slope": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrument_landing_system_glid...
This does not sound coherent. Airliners consume more fuel lower down than higher up. And they definietly don’t “glide” them in the aviation sense.