I just want it to work without headaches. I don’t want workarounds and “turn off all of the extra nonsense” sliders. Call me an old or a Karen. But this is one reason why I picked Mac for 12+ years, and I am increasingly switching my workload to Linux. It’s not a fashion accessory for me.
I am willing to learn the new features. But half-assed widgets that get in the way, menu bar quirkiness, losing finder menu settings, and more are increasingly common.
As a counterpoint to this, as a new Mac user I feel the settings redesign is a night and day improvement. The new settings menu isn’t perfect, but visually I much prefer a two column layout where everything is in a vertical list than a large pile of icons. People also complain about similarity to iOS, but then again, it’s nice that my knowledge of where certain settings are on my phone translates directly over to my laptop. And when that fails, the search works great too, unless Apple named the specific setting something weird, which they do have a tendency towards.