My suspicion is that genpop is not going to like it, broadly, mostly because the only people who seem to think that operating systems should have "personality" are techies. People just don't think like that; most people view these systems as means to an end, and anything that isn't in service to that is, at best, simply an interesting diversion for the first few days.

One thing I dislike the most about liquid glass is the new bottom tab bar that's been inserted into every first-party app. Apple Music got it the worst. There's now an additional click required to "move" between the Search interface and the remaining four tabs (Home, New, Radio, Library). When you click on Search, you need to click the the Search Box again to get a keyboard. All of these interactions have extremely sophisticated and slow animations; e.g. when on Home, clicking on Library slides a bubble across the tab bar that blows up beyond the tab bar itself, reflecting the intermediate tabs and underlying content, in a way that is tremendously distracting and serves no purpose. Neither Reduce Transparency nor Reduce Motion have any impact on these animations, on the latest release.

In fact, many of Apple's first party apps appear to have forgotten that Reduce Transparency and Reduce Motion even exist as accessibility options, or at best have half-assed their implementation. For example, with Reduce Motion enabled, clicking on an album in Apple Music deploys a much more subtle animation (good); clicking the back button uses that same subtle animation (good); but swiping back from the left uses the flowery, unnecessary animation that you'd get with Reduce Motion off. Apple Podcasts has the same problem. iMessage, as far as I can tell, totally disregards the Reduce Motion setting and does nothing different, and implements the Reduce Transparency setting not by softening the transparency as other apps do, but instead underlaying a #000000 black background on every item that did have transparency. There's dozens of examples all across iOS, and we're quite literally days from release; dropdowns such as the Apple Notes or Apple News hamburger [...] menu should animate less under Reduce Motion, but don't; when buttons are disabled on the keyboard, such as Apple News -> Search -> empty search box, the Enter button is greyed out in the wrong, barely legible color, only when Reduce Transparency is enabled, the list goes on.

> the only people who seem to think that operating systems should have "personality" are techies

I am not so sure. It might even be the opposite. Techies and designers gave us the flat UI aesthetic, Material UI, Windows Metro design, etc. Techies also nitpick design and aesthetics far more than average folks do. Techies and designers derided Windows XP, but most average users thought it was "cute" and "fun" compared to the "boring" previous design. It is definitely the most memorable release in the past 30 years as far as UI goes. This iOS version could wind up being similar after so many years of the flat UI.

The bugs/kinks are a good point though, and I have noticed some UX changes too that I am unsure about. This is the first complete UI redo in long time for iOS, so I am sure they will get these things worked out over time.

I don't think so, I think the general population gets happy and excited by new things, because they believe it to be somehow better than the old thing. A new cool visual refresh of the OS is something that people gravitate towards, even when it's mostly a superficial restyling hiding decades of cruft (Windows 11)