Every time I use notion I can feel the PMs working there under pressure to ship some arbitrary (more often than not "AI") feature each quarter to meet some arbitrary KPI set by leadership.

The base product was originally great: very smooth wysiwyg collaborative document editor with wiki-like linking. The problem is you don't need to do much on top of that. But clearly investors demand some "results" so PMs need to keep coming up with features that can be shipped in a quarter. Meanwhile bugs in the basic UX are plentiful.

Any really interesting work to improve the basic "collaborative document" experience is going to take time and experimentation, and I'm sure there's something to be found there. But the investor fueled focus on constantly doing something new and shiny means these really interesting spaces will never be explore and the product will continue to degrade with bloat each quarter.

It's really too bad. I looked at Notion pretty extensively not long after it launched and it seemed really good compared to tools like OneNote. I wasn't at a place where I could transition to it at the time but remembered it. Several years later when I was looking for new tooling, I looked at it again and was puzzled that it seemed kinda slow and convoluted.

It's unfortunate that it's an online service. At least with tools like OneNote, now that it's been screwed up with cloud, AI, etc we can still go back to the old perpetual license, local-first versions which are still great.

in which year was the Notion base product smooth? 2022 after buying a Mac Studio?

That sounds like most of software engineering. After a product reaches maturity, very little feature development is actually needed. None of SAP's clients are asking for AI (yet we get Joule), nobody using Office wanted Copilot.

Meanwhile consumers have been asking for better Siri for ages, and that hasn't been delivered yet.

Notion's USP was always simplicity. Anyone could use it, anyone could find data in it, the lack of features was a selling point. But, as you say, the attitude changed at some point from aggressive simplicity to feature bloat and now AI slop.