Would love to read your manifesto of what "doing it right" entails.
but Apple (and Windows) nowadays reeks of promotion-driven development. ship a new feature and make sure people use it by making it as annoyingly in-your-face as possible, so you can show "impact". do that for just a few years and you're reliably left with a confusing, inconsistent, and extremely chaotic new user experience as each of those features jockeys for prime eyeball real estate.
mobile games with tons of features to spend money on are often a prime example of this, where new users a year after it launched are stuck in hours of tutorials and broken UI due to dozens of notifications that barely fit on screen, and Windows is not far behind with some sellers' junkware. Apple hasn't reached that far yet (AFAICT), but it's clearly headed in the same direction.
Linux has many, many flaws as a user-friendly desktop environment, but this is not one of them. take a clean install. boot up the first time. it's very likely you'll be greeted by a single "welcome" window (a normal one that you can just close) or nothing at all, just a working environment, regardless of the version you chose. that's unambiguously a more simple, less annoying, less spammy experience. Apple used to be almost this smooth.
Etc etc etc. With all that in mind, a few dozen/hundred features a year (depending on what you count as a feature) sounds quite tame to me. If you look at each individual app, they honestly get way less churn and change for the sake of change than most products on the market do. For example my usage of Notes.app has remained more or less unchanged over the last 15 years, while in a fraction of that time apps like Notion will shift stuff around and force workflows on me a half dozen times. I don't even remember Apple killing a core app that people relied on? That can't be said for most any competitor.
The hate towards the new design system that feels rushed and is riddled with inconsistencies and legibility problems is justified. Comparing macOS to Windows - an operating system that has been literally shoving ads in our faces, or saying "well they should just take inspiration from Linux and just not ship new features" feels... as weak of an argument as it gets.
but yes, Windows is worse here. that doesn't make current-Apple good at it though. they've just collaboratively lowered the hurdle quite a lot, and still trip on it frequently.
and Linux ships tons of features, but they don't throw it in your face. it does that so quietly you apparently didn't even notice. (this is not in any way meant to claim Linux handles feature changes well, or helps you find stuff you might need, or much of anything, because it does not. just that it doesn't advertise to you, in the vast majority of distros)
But out of the box it's pretty clear that iPhone is quite a mess compared to most modern Androids. All the swiping from various non-obvious directions is just crazily non-discoverable, and on top of that it's easy to accidentally do something you didn't want - like pulling down notifications when you wanted control panel, or vice versa.
OTOH Android 2.x 4-button experience (back, home, context, search) was clean and very discoverable. Especially on devices where the buttons were separate hardware ones, like Nexus One - no swiping bullshit, you just press the button that you see, and that does the same thing every time.
But yes 100%, buttons are great. They respond much much faster too.
Modern consumer tech in a nutshell. It's less about serving the paying end-user and more about self promotion. There's so much neediness and entitlement in the design.
You're quite right about the relative calm in Linux. It knows it's an operating system, and an OS is supposed to stay out of the way and simply support the user's needs, not be a billboard for junk.
If there is a definition of doing it right then it is a better experience in following that rather than adding new features that don't match the definition no matter what it is.
And if the definition changes then you should be changing everything which takes resources away from new features. Unfortunately new features grab the attention of media an influencers and so that is what gets you the money.