Mh, I don't know. Some of the changes that people complain the most about (from Leopard's 3D dock to Safari 15 tabs) were undone by Apple. And for some changes that haven't been undone, like monochrome icons everywhere, I still mis-click things so often that I doubt it's just nostalgia.

If you'd let people mix and match elements from different eras of macOS, I'm sure you'd see some patterns regardless of when people got into Macs; similar to how people have lots of abstract opinions about architecture, but somehow the tourist buses always stop at the same cozy-looking old towns. Beauty and usability are not entirely subjective.

I’ve been an Apple user since the early 80’s. Apple being simultaneously the gods of UI and scourge of UI have been a constant, along with the ‘doomed’ narrative. A lot of this is the peanut gallery repeating what they’ve heard, as well as exaggeration of the issues individuals face. For instance, in the 40 or so years that I’ve used computers, I believe they have never been more user-friendly than they are now for the typical user. Not just Macs, but Windows and Linux’s desktops too. Reading opinions here would make you think the opposite is true, but here is full of people that love to tinker, and fewer seem to want to go back to the “good old days”. Hence the ‘rose tinted glasses’ comment. I was there, it wasn’t that great! I jest, well a little bit anyway. I remember Tiger being released and a-not-insignificant-amount of people complaining about brushed metal. As I said, it has been ever this. Long may it continue - it makes us that do care think.

Yep. Everyone is cool with all the change that was necessary to get software to the point where they were most emotionally attached to it, and all change after that is “useless meddling that no one likes and is only done to give PMs and designers a job.”

This massively oversimplifies the state of technology and is unfairly dismissive of the significant productivity hit that some changes can inflict on the most loyal and experienced users.

It’s certainly possible for changes in UI to significantly harm productivity, but you would need to systematically gather evidence to know if this is happening. Whether it’s happening is almost completely independent of anyone’s individual feeling of frustration at needing to learn about and adapt to new UI changes.

But more importantly, they existence of change is inherently important to the large-scale advancement of computing over time. Even if it is the case that a certain UI overhaul of a major operating system harmed productivity, the solution is not “permanently halt all software changes after this specific version that I have learned and enjoy using.” We ought to reject arguments that forced stasis is the solution any time changes introduce risk.