in the very beginning, there was a lot of animation stutters on android. The UI was much less consistent, and the design language of different programs varied pretty wildly. This gave me at the time, a feeling of a distinct lack of polish..

I would say, though that in the year of our Lord 2025, largely hardware is good enough that the animations never stutter on android anymore, an android applications have largely converged on similar UI paradigms.

So I think the issue with criticism is that people hold in the heads for a very long time, I mean a clear example is how people think Linux is extremely user hostile, despite most metrics of what makes something user hostile being significantly superior on most widely available in the next distributions except of course the power user focused ones. Whereas Windows 11 and macOS clearly do not give a shit about breaking muscle memory or having UI inconsistency.

Criticisms live longer in our minds than they do in reality.