I’m not sure that macOS changed as much as developer practices did.

Dock icons bouncing are usually the result of the app opening a modal alert window. Those can’t foreground the host app and they used to be what devs reached for 9 times out of 10.

These days though everybody and their dog has a menubar item or daemon running in the background (whether such a thing is actually necessary or not) and the only way windows spawned by apps like that (which have no Dock icon) can get the user’s attention and not have the windows they spawn get lost in the shuffle is for the app to call the foregrounding API, and so that’s exactly what they do.

Contrast this to years ago when almost no apps had menu items or daemons and were standalone.

There’s also been a staggering loss of decorum when it comes to these things. Companies have become shameless about pestering the user’s attention, and so there’s probably some regular Dock-icon-having apps that call the foregrounding API when they shouldn’t be too.

In my opinion menubar items, daemons, and foregrounding are all being abused by devs and Apple needs to get them under control. Apps shouldn’t be able to add menu items or daemons without the user’s explicit permission and foregrounding should he treated similarly to push permissions.

People say Microsoft has no UI taste, but they used to be decent. They had sensible guidelines and behaviors

For example for this case, the taskbar icon would blink three times and then remain highlighted. So it would grab your attention, but not hold it, and then you could still easily see at a glance which app it was

At some point, like many other things, it looks like this either was changed or broke/doesn't work consistently. But I thought it was a nice design