It's because a lot of us resist the implicit argument that UI changes are automatically improvement when in fact it's just as often regression.

Yep. Look at IntelliJ. It just copied VsCode when it already had a great UI where things were easy to find and consistent. Now it’s got meaningless icons and hides important stuff by default, making it modern but far worse than before. Thank goodness emacs is not trying to chase the latest and stupidest.