Just because skeuomorphism had gone too far, doesn't mean that ditching it completely was the right move. A step in the right direction would have been removing the rich, corinthian leather from the calendar app. What we got was a total obliteration of affordances that made the UI easy to understand and intuit.
This problem persists to this day, probably because there is no clear way to indicate intractability in the post iOS 7 design language. For example, I was recently confused by where a setting in macOS had gone until I realized the (i) icons in some settings panels are clickable and bring up an additional setting modal (example from the Battery settings [1]). WTF!? There's no indication that this is a button at all - you either know this is a button or you don't.
And there's my perpetual bugbear - information density. Apparently it's getting worse again[2] with liquid glass, but iOS 7 was the original sin here. Removing affordances necessitated using whitespace to separate controls from each other and from content in many places because you have nothing else - but this means a dense, compact UI is often no longer possible.
[1] https://support.apple.com/en-us/108376
[2] https://mjtsai.com/blog/2025/07/04/ios-26-information-densit...
