The new System Settings is an obvious one; Sonoma hasn’t really touched that at all despite its glaring issues. But Notification Centre has been borderline useless ever since they redesigned it back in what, Big Sur? I saw a Mastodon post recently [0] that highlighted how bad it is today compared to the old design, yet it’s barely been touched in 3 years.
macOS is stable and established and unlike iOS a lot of people rely on it to do actual work, I would rather them not mess with stuff than half-ass it and leave it unfinished.
The settings app for example was perfectly fine, it worked well for what...near 20 years with only slight tweaks. Now I have to use the search bar for settings, because it's not obvious at all where to find a lot of them.
And yet things that would be useful like a volume mixer are still nowhere to be found.
Flat design looks much, much cleaner.
Same for iOS. iOS 7 was the first version that I actually liked looking at.
Frequently these days, with lots of overlapping windows I try to click the top of a window only to find out I’ve clicked on part of the window behind.
Yes having everything one colour is lovely and ‘clean’ but horrible to use