Given that Apple tend to have long periods of crud accumulating and releases becoming slower, buggier and more annoying they should revamp their entire release process and make quality a more prominent part of the release process. Linux did so with its odd/even version numbering to signal which kernels were considered stable and which were development versions.

For each major release cycle the longest part of the cycle should be focused on code quality and cleanup. So that people who depend on the stability of their operating environment can configure the software update process to just wait until a new OS release has gone through a bugfix AND cleanup cycle.

Why spend more time on cleanup that on features? Well, so far it seems to have been the other way around. Which means that everyone has to waste a lot of time while some experimental OS is making your life miserable. People who want to use bleeding edge features can upgrade as soon as a new major release is dropped. But people like me, who depend on their phone and computer to make a living, would rather not be field-testing buggy, slow experimental code.

And not to put too fine a point on it, iOS was crap. And from what I am hearing macOS Tahoe isn't worth the upgrade so I keep clicking away those annoying popups that try to get me to install it.

Yeah, I get it, the guy from marketing isn't going to like it, but we could also stop pretending that every new major release is a gift to humanity. We don't think so and Apple knows it isn't so. Every release comes with dread. What will stop working this time?

It isn't like Apple doesn't have the means to hire developers.