On my personal machine and phone I’ll probably skip this release entirely and revisit on 27.
On the macOS side, it gets more locked and buggy and inconsistent with every release.
This is just a general comment for Apple OSs today, not specifically version 26.2.
Visually I think it's a regression, it doesn't feel like it makes a statement but rather there are some random transparency effects that look somewhere between neutral and a little ugly (like they are anti-antialiasing) but legibility doesn't suffer in any way that matters.