I know a few people at Notion, and one thing I can say is that they have taste, in the way Apple has taste. I think this shows in their product.
Notion was one of THE new tastemakers. Every startup copying their designs, now there’s AI generators to make “notion style art”. To see their new pages and additions have such clunky copyrighting is disappointing and I hope just temporary, not a sign the tastemakers have left the company.
But to give you a more substantive response, I think the tastemakers are not in control in the slightest. Everything about Notion now screams "we don't give a crap about note-taking or personal wikis, we want a piece of that juicy enterprise market".
But now that they've added a ton of features requested left and right, and effectively presented Notion as a one-stop solution to every documentation problem, I don't see much taste and elegance persisting. Not that the people you know lost their taste, more that it doesn't matter if they have to say yes to absolutely everything to keep being a one-stop solution that does it all.
In my or people started changing the way they write to stop triggering Notion features, and on the other side figjam and spreadsheet documents are coming back even as it could have been a Notion page.
There's definitely a shift IMHO. Notion will keep being used, but it might not be the first choice when other simpler options are available.
I really don't. Notion is one of those tools that entrepreneurs gravitate towards for it's simplicity, and then engineers rip out for being a parasite. At the end of the day it's an overpriced CMS that can very easily be replaced by any number of different alternatives. Their "taste" is just as overrated and overpriced as Apple's is.