Jobs liked to talk this side of the business up because creatives were the substantial part of the business. Now they sell to everybody it doesn't matter so much. The average person won't even notice the complaints in the original article. They aren't sensitive to it in the way that creative people are.
They don't notice, but they can _feel_ it. My aging mother, god bless, doesn't give a crap about design.. but she updated her iPhone and asked me what I thought about it because she hates it. And it wasn't nitpicking design choices - she just said 'it's so hard for me to do anything now and know where anything is'
They might not _notice_ but that doesn't mean it's not affecting their ability to use their computer smoothly.
With computers such a huge part of almost everyone's lives now, it's a travesty for one of the largest companies in the world to inflict something so subpar on so many old-style
I'll chime in with the others to say that "amateur" users still notice, even if my dad isn't calling me to say "Son, why does this new MacOS version have different icons for the `New` action across apps?"
I had to help him "get his bookmarks back" meaning see his bookmarks toolbar in Firefox. He must have hit a keyboard combo on accident. Since Firefox hides the menus by default, I had to tell him to tap Alt to see the menu, after which he was easily guided to View > Toolbars > Bookmarks Toolbar.
Bad UI design for novices is felt, if not conveyed outright.
I consider myself above average with UI design, but I still got confused with that dang "i" icon in the Preview app just yesterday.
I had to add my signature and write in the date so it looks like it was handwritten. So the plan was to just draw the date with a pencil tool and if that failed use the text tool to write the date.
First I instinctively clicked the pencil icon which turned out to be a highlighter. That's a great example where if they had added color for the tip and line it would have clearly looked like a highlighter. After that failed, I clicked that "i" icon because it looks like it's for inserting text. Honestly I was in such a rush I didn't even see the info pane popping up and was dang confused when nothing was happening.
I'm very familiar with info icons and have used them in my own apps, yet I had never seen one without the circle around it.
Jobs liked to talk this side of the business up because creatives were the substantial part of the business. Now they sell to everybody it doesn't matter so much. The average person won't even notice the complaints in the original article. They aren't sensitive to it in the way that creative people are.