"see other fruit flavoured platforms pull worse on their user base"

No vague assertions, please be more specific

"yet their fan base not only approves of it, but they somehow justify"

Coincidentally their "fan base" is composed of several people with design and user experience knowledge (in various degrees) so I believe their acceptance of things has a basis. (And it doesn't mean they accept everything)

Edit: as an example quoted by the other commenter, inversion of scrolling direction was a big change. But it is configurable, so you can always go back

The natural scrolling makes sense if you're using a trackpad, but for a scroll wheel it's awful