I see mail now has mandatory images next to each mail item, how can that be turned off?

I did not know that, thanks. But still - if I have to research now how to do that it‘s still going in the wrong direction, no? Besides, it‘s rare that Apple gives a choice, usually you have to adapt at whatever they decide.

There is no way to get the old Photos interface back.

reboot your phone at that point ...

Mail got category buttons on top that split your inbox so now to check your mail you have to click around because shipping notification are in a separate list from work emails. Photos had a perfectly fine interface with tabs that got changed into a long list of often redundant categories. Thankfully it can be customized a bit. New control center (wifi toggles etc.) was replaced with a customizable grid of widgets that is buggy, slow and looks ugly and unprofessional in comparison with the old interface. Gimmick. Home screen icon size and color is customizable now and it looks out of place. Gimmick. If you have a dark theme enabled then icons in settings become themed and look different than icons on the home screen with is weird and inconsistent with the rest of the interface. All animations were reworked and feel like crap. There is a delay to every action and it feels like animation smoothness takes priority over interface responsiveness. Home screen swiping animation stutters every time. Even though there is not a single new feature available for EU users other than the interface changes the entire OS feels sluggish, bloated and unfinished. Performance is terrible. This update made my iPhone 12 slow down to a crawl. Feels like running Vista on a Windows XP machine and since they dropped security updates for iOS 17 I had no choice but to upgrade. This combined with the recent news about iPhones listening to people at homes makes me want to get rid of my phone entirely. I don’t want a new iPhone and I sure as hell don’t want an Android.