This problem persists to this day, probably because there is no clear way to indicate intractability in the post iOS 7 design language. For example, I was recently confused by where a setting in macOS had gone until I realized the (i) icons in some settings panels are clickable and bring up an additional setting modal (example from the Battery settings [1]). WTF!? There's no indication that this is a button at all - you either know this is a button or you don't.
And there's my perpetual bugbear - information density. Apparently it's getting worse again[2] with liquid glass, but iOS 7 was the original sin here. Removing affordances necessitated using whitespace to separate controls from each other and from content in many places because you have nothing else - but this means a dense, compact UI is often no longer possible.
[1] https://support.apple.com/en-us/108376
[2] https://mjtsai.com/blog/2025/07/04/ios-26-information-densit...