Visually, it has been an ongoing degradation over the past 15-ish years, in the sense of UI controls versus content having become progressively harder to distinguish and less self-explanatory. Functionally, there is less consistency between apps and in UI idioms than there used to be.
And while UI controls have been becoming harder to recognize, they've also been inflating to waste more screen space. Liquid Glass is a big jump in that respect. Though the web has been afflicted much worse, because everything online is now designed with a touch-first UI in mind and information density is not a priority at all.
