The fact that our species is successful doesn't mean that every mechanism in our bodies is good. There are a lot of "design decisions" which could have been improved if they had gone through a review, rather than evolution.

One such example is the way our retinas are wired to the optic nerve on the inside of the eye, rather than behind, causing us to have a "blind spot" where the nerve fibres need to go back. In some other animals, particularly the octopus, the retina is wired the "right way", such that they don't have a blind spot.

Same for the design of our pharynx, larynx and esophagus. As mentioned in sibling comments, other animals suffer from choking much less, as compared to humans, where we have ~5k deaths/year from choking just in the US [0].

[0]https://www.statista.com/statistics/527321/deaths-due-to-cho...

Nor does it mean it is terrible. That is the kind of exaggregation I reacted on.

I guess you feel it's an exaggeration, but how? We put physical filters in front of basically anything we build that takes in air for the exact reason of it's bad to take in anything other than air for systems that only expect air.

Choking kills thousands of people every year and is the fourth leading cause in children under 5. According to this article (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35099619/), aspirated pneumonia is even worse, especially for older people, who guess what, can't chew well.

And it's all due to the (apparently not terrible) design.

In order for you to subjectively label it terrible you need to present a bad outcome from the design. Evolutionary/objectively, it's not a bad design.

How do you define and measure evolutionary "success"? By what mechanisms is it achieved?

For a cross-species comparison, you'd usually measure evolutionary success in terms of biomass. More is better.

You don't. It is not even agreed upon that evolution optimizes <<something>>.

And even if you agree that evolution is an optimization process, attempts to define its objective function run into problems with tautology and circular definitions once you move beyond simple examples.

It is described by Dawkins et al.

More successful == gets to have more surviving offspring.

That is the TL;DR. He, she or it that has the most babies, wins.