This is the unintuitive thing about growth stage companies and just the scale that internet companies can achieve today. They might already have a million users who are happy with how it works and would rather that the UI didn't change. But they are on track to grow to 100 million users, and so if making things a little bit more flashy improves the new user activation rate by a small percentage for the next 99 million users, that can dwarf the preferences of the existing users. Especially if the existing users grumble for a few days but then mostly continue using the product.

I believe most users see a tech product as a tool, "The thing that gets you to the thing". Whereas a majority in tech view those tools more as experiences. An experience puts more focus on the process itself, at the expense of the end result.

Unfortunately this tech oligopoly landscape doesn't leave users many ways to express this preference, but I often wonder if the culture will change at some point in the future as the industry matures.

An aging western population might have an influence here as well, in the long term. Older folks have less tolerance for having to relearn how to do the same thing they already knew how to do for the umpteenth time.