> it's astonishing how rapidly Apple improved after Ive's departure

Is there another Apple? What improvements are you talking about, leave alone astonishing ones?

Perhaps people can argue with me: I claim skeuomorphism jumped the shark with the pseudo reel-to-reel playback UI in ... was it the Podcasts app? Or maybe people think it was Notes with the torn edge along the top margin.

Regardless, skeuomorphism seems to have gone too far at some point. Perhaps became overly cute, overly precious, pretty-pretty.

Skeuomorphism was said to have been the thing in early GUI computers, as metaphor or real objects, that helped early users to those interfaces understand them. Dragging a file icon that looked like a dog-eared piece of paper to a trash can icon on the screen (to delete the file) — the most obvious example.

I suspect by the time the Web came around, users had to become more comfortable with being bombarded with all manner of wild UI paradigms and they learned to more or less cope. Skeuomorphism, like training wheels, were perhaps not really needed as much as they had been a decade earlier.