I don't know about that. Aqua with it's pin stripes jewel-like buttons and other quirks was significantly worse than what we have today.

Strongly disagree. Apple’s obsession with making things like scroll bars and window chrome harder to see has been a usability nightmare for me over the last few releases.

Frequently these days, with lots of overlapping windows I try to click the top of a window only to find out I’ve clicked on part of the window behind.

Yes having everything one colour is lovely and ‘clean’ but horrible to use

also all the icons now being the same shape (like ios) i find myself scanning over and over missing apps i used to find so easily before... such a usability regression (though it does look pretty)

I will confess I miss skeuomorphism, but even if Apple never embraced flatness, Ventura's System Preferences.app is horrendous. I've become reliant upon the search bar to find most things in there, which I rarely had to do before.

I strongly disagree. Tiger was the best Mac OS ever looked in my opinion, but this is of course subjective.

Tiger was brushed steel, though it still had the 'lickable' buttons.

Remember that displays were worse then. One reason we have flat lower-contrast designs now is that we have much higher contrast LCD/OLED panels.

Yup. I absolutely hated that skeuomorphic blurry 3D-like design.

Flat design looks much, much cleaner.

Same for iOS. iOS 7 was the first version that I actually liked looking at.

And system settings panel is so unresponsive! I think it’s written in react or something?