Apple has become beholden to announcements. Work that someone can shove into a feature that someone else decides is flashy enough to maybe get mentioned on stage gets resourcing and support. Work that isn't going to show up in a Keynote deck gets ignored.

That means that all of the polish work is shoved to the bottom of the stack until it reaches sufficient critical mass that someone finally makes time for engineers to pick some of it back out.

That, I think, is the critical failure of modern Apple. The company used to understand that polish could be more important than something new and flashy, and they've forgotten that in favor of marketing and Liquid Glass.