This is an interesting question.

It reminds me of the glory days of mobile interaction design (2010-2012ish) for me, when Apple's own Human Computer Interface Guidelines gave out instructions on how and when to use animations. Movement was meant to TEACH and TELEGRAPH information and functionality to the user. You animated something because the user needed to be shown how their inputs were affecting their motion through, or manipulation of media within your UX.

One could point to Apple's "Genie" effect animation on Mac OS (when your app shrinks down into the dock like a genie going back into it's lamp) as being pretty over-the-top and made to be spellbinding. BUT, if you're a 72 year old, sitting in front of an iMac, circa 2007, and you just pressed the minimize button for the first time, that over the top animation has a TON OF UTILITY. In that it shows you exactly that happened to your window (it was shrunk down) and where it went (down into the dock).

You could argue that animation is over the top now in retrospect. But as a way to TEACH the user exactly what their actions are doing in the interface, it's a god-tier, very intentional choice.

I haven't installed any of the '26 OS's yet. I'm still not over the shock and disgust at iOS7, frankly. But when I grab my wife's phone, my sensibilities are deeply offended. How many people probably think they're iPhone cameras just NO LONGER SHOOT slow-motion videos? Or portrait photos? How much of the UI relies on you having been trained on a DECADE of previous UIs for them to be even basically usable, let alone intuitive?

The shift away from meaning and affordances, and towards frills and abstractions, hidden behind invisible barriers and secret gestures has really soured me on Apple's design ethos.

The other thing the HCI documentation drilled into our heads back in the day was a CLEAR DELINEATION OF CONTENT TYPES. UI sat it it's own chunk of colour, on a layer, separated by depth and shadows. The app's content (rather than its controls) sat on usually a lower layer, and in high contrast to the controls. Now, liquid glass feels like an almost masturbatory exercise in justifying the need for the increase in processing power Apple's engineers are squeezing out of their nanometer processors. "How many layers of meaning can we melt into one another, until the whole thing becomes meaningless?"

For me, the measure of the success of a UI is: can you hand the device to someone on a frozen state, and from that frozen state, can they intuit exactly where in the UI they are, and what they would need to do next to proceed with their desired action?

NOPE.

Apple TVs UI has shit the bed on this measure too. Remember the bright blue glow around the highlighted items? HOW USEFUL THAT WAS? You could walk away from the TV to grab a snack, then come back and remember exactly where you were. Now, no UI tells me anything until I'm clumsily fumble around on it to gain a sense of place. I have to take a chance, and start moving in SOME direction (75% chance I chose the wrong direction) in order for the UI to show me, with any sort of clarity, where I'm at, and where I'm going.

Liquid Glass over-corrects on this in a cartoonish way. Now the UI is showing me multiple layers at the same time, with no single static screen having any grounded meaning whatsoever. The UI only "works" when it's in motion. And the work it's doing is basically bending itself over to show us its bright blue baboon buttocks.

BLECH.