Don't understand why. A ~6" phone screen and a 3x1440p setup have little in common regarding what "effective" UX looks like. Unifying them for the sake of consistency risks making both worse.
This isn't unifying anything, but providing the laziest solution possible for MacOS by copy/pasting the visual design of iOS.
Sidenote: Does macOS Control Center even support any shortcut keys? I've honestly never tried, but a cursory search suggests there's no way to map a shortcut key to a Control Center action though you can open it with Fn-C. Again, lazy copy/paste of the iOS UI without adding any of the functionality a desktop power user might expect.
Long-press isn't a macOS convention, which I assume is why there's an "Edit Controls" button at the bottom of Control Center for macOS. Right-clicking controls does show contextual menus as you'd expect.
> …a cursory search suggests there's no way to map a shortcut key to a Control Center action…
Desktop power users can (1) Fn-C and tab through them (as you said), (2) navigate Control Center using macOS's usual keyboard accessibility features, (3) create keyboard-activated Shortcuts, (4) use third-party utilities like Keyboard Maestro and Karabiner-Elements, etc.
I understand that Linux has solved this problem, but it's interesting to see Apple's progress on harmonizing their OS/device experiences over the last decade. I expect that there will always be shitty individual UI details you can pick on if that's your thing, like this detail from macOS 26.0's Calendar: https://imgur.com/a/BYalaa1
It looks like a lot of the hate flowing on HN is just people looking at worst-case screenshots on blogs and piling on. They haven't even used it.
There are a few things I'm not wild about, but for the most part it's a bunch of shoulder-shrugs. This isn't the end-of-the-world scenario that people are making it out to be.
I have a regular non-techie person in the family with a Mac who I think will like the changes. Those are the people who Apple is targeting. Not the tech bros and the wannabe posers who are desperately clutching their 10-year-old iPhones out of some kind of righteous indignation.