The one thing that bugs me about museum tours these days is that they all wear in-ear headphones connected to the guide. Which means whereas before you'd mostly have groups of 5 people with one guide, you now have groups of 20 people walking 20 meters behind one guide because distance isn't an issue. Some rooms become unbearable, it's like you take a super busy street market in Mumbai and hang up some paintings and expect people to enjoy the art while navigating through a flood of people.
In a way it helps because you get fewer guides and possibly less shouting. You'd hope this makes things more quiet but it doesn't. It drops the costs of a guide for individuals to next to nothing due to the size of the groups, so you get massive groups and more groups.
Having a few groups of two or three individuals standing around isn't an issue. But when it's a blob of 15-20 people, it's no longer possible to navigate through it or look through/past it, you have to go around and if they're infront of an art piece, you're mostly out of luck.
As for the city, in many parts you hardly hear any Italian and if you do, it's someone in the tourist business trying to sell you something.
I'm not necessarily complaining, I'm part of the problem haha. Just sharing my experience.
Does seem to support the article's hypothesis that people are really determined to collect the marquee experience and don't necessarily feel motivated to do much else.
We actually found Florence to be busy almost everywhere, even with lots of people still wandering around at night. The Uffizi was the one place that was impossible to enjoy, mostly because of the tour groups. I wish they would limit the number of people in any given room at a time. But, we wandered across to the Museo Galileo and had it to ourselves.