I'd say that what apple did with liquid glass, forcing it onto its customers is kind of what jobs would do. "We know better, shut up plebe"
In that way, the apple from today isn't very different from the apple of jobs.
The reality is, people hate change period. The flat UI that everyone is now pining for was pretty roundly hated when it debuted too. And the reaction to the original OS X interfaces with its "lickable" buttons was also pretty full of hate and anger. And in every one of those cases, some of the complaints were valid, and Apple in some of those cases walked the changes back or adjusted them. But a large UI change also just comes with a lot of hate in general because everything is different.
There are plenty of parts about the new liquid glass UIs that are fine. They may not be your preferred aesthetic choice, but the flat UI or the heavy skeumorphic UI of days of old wasn't everyone's preferred aesthetic choice either. Personally I've found myself recently looking for KDE themes that bring back late 90's platinum/beOS/Next style "drawn 3D" UIs (which is a terrible term for it, but I don't have a better word at hand for what I'm thinking of). Liquid Glass will be refined, improved and sanded down into something people are fine with and in 10 more years when Apple releases a new UI we'll have this same discussion again.
But there are some real rough edges to be sanded down still. There are places where the transparency effects mean the underlying color/text bleeds into the menu / UI text that you actually want to read. It happens way less than you'd expect from critical screen shots, and a lot of the time it's less that it makes the UI text unreadable and more that it makes it look like a graphical glitch. But it does happen, that's not great and needs to get cleaned up.
There's also a weird level of "flatness" to some parts of the UI, that seem to rely on color contrasts to get the depth, but then that means that in certain situations the depth that should be there is missing. A good example if this is the safari button bar. On a site like HN where the background is white/off-white, the buttons and their bezels just sort of look like a flat white on a flat light grey. A site with a solid dark grey like daringfireball's website on the other hand allows the edges of the buttons to give a little bit of depth, but there's basically 0 contrast between the control backgrounds and the bar background. But then a site like slashdot has a medium grey background and now the buttons not only have color contrast but the slight shading around the bottom edges gives them depth that's not present in either of the other cases. When it works, the effect is nice, the problem is their theming system isn't (yet?) smart enough to make it work all the time.
This is what I’ve been thinking too, ever since Tim Cook fired Scott Forstall over Apple Maps. To be frank, it’s about a decade later now and Apple Maps still sucks big time in many countries, and Google Maps is what iPhone users there use. Coming back to the change of people, the huge messes made by Jonny Ives (without Steve Jobs to balance him out) on hardware (the butterfly keyboard was his design and decision, AFAIK) and software just carried on for years. Now Alan Dye and his team seem to be tanking the user interface and user experience like there’s nobody with any taste left at Apple.
Add to this the turf war between John Giannandrea and Craig Federighi on the AI part, with Federighi winning the game, it doesn’t look like Tim Cook has a good grasp on people’s abilities and how to manage them. Cook has his strengths in supply chain and manufacturing, but design (along with better software quality) are not his strengths or focus areas.
Based on what?
The "majority" you talk about doesn't exist in my experience, it's like the 1% arguing between "this is life changing" and "I hate this".