I know little about Apple, but have quite a bit of experience with how software products get "designed". Goofy and offensive things happen when corporations decide not to pay attention to customers.
The decision to ignore customer and focus on market wow is not the software design team. It is a systemic and structural thing.
Weird sentence given that three staunch supporters of liquid glass are still in that team, including Lemay. I highly doubt it's going anywhere, hopefully it gets a few more improvements before it will be replaced for The New Thing in MacOS 29.
There are lots of things (well, in iOS) that I think are a big improvement, like menus spawning from the button you tapped instead of a bottom sheet popping up from the bottom of the screen. And the nested list menus are very nice.
But completely eradicating toolbars and replacing them with a fade that still doesn't allow buttons legible in all cases was clearly a mistake. And it's something they're backtracking on!