Exactly, they lost all the attention to detail, all the pursuit of clarity, all that was abandoned.

IMHO it's far less "pretty" than before too, in addition to just being an outright mess. And that's when it's working as intended.

There's still loads of obvious bugs in dark mode, where there's completely incompatible outlines and rounded rectangles with incompatible radii and overlapping elements that are clearly not intended.

That's on top of how the individual UX elements were mangled to fit into poor categorization schemes, with unnecessary complexity. Two things that bite me every single day are the completely overcomplicated screenshot interface that slows interaction by a great deal, and navigating to Safari history, which requires tapping a "Bookmarks" button.

And on macOS, the pointless visual noise of icons by menu items, that are each indecipherable, incoherent, and inconsistent between apps.. It's just unprofessional all around. I'm not surprised that the VP responsible left that same year, but there's been no fix, which is awful.

I was on the iPadOS 26 beta all summer (last year). Until early August I was convinced they would just cancel the release completely and roll back. Would've been the only good decision. But I guess the bad press they would've gotten for that was deemed more expensive than just releasing it.

They cleaned up a lot of things with the minor 26.x releases and even more with 27.0, but it's still years away from being done.