Almost every update I'm skeptical at first and then after a while I see a screenshot of the old UI and think "how did I ever use that?"

Tahoe I've been using since it came out and every time I see a screenshot of prior versions I think "wow it used to look so much better"

I've always been "pro-change" for UIs, as opposed to the bunch of people in the "bring the old UI back" camp, but Tahoe looked like fecal matter from the moment it was introduced.

On iOS it's manageable with reduced transparency, but on macOS it's just so awful I won't upgrade.

I'm sure this is true, and that there will always be a (likely disproportionately) loud group of complainers, many of whom will forget about their complaints. I haven't really publicly complained about Tahoe before, and I don't intend on whining about it again. But...

It's fine. I'm not going to rail about how it's unusable, or say that it makes me want to gouge out my eyes, or whatever. But it's enough to dissuade me from ever wanting to buy another Mac, if I have the option of using a desktop Linux system.

That's a pretty big caveat. But those curved window borders and the rounded widgets in e.g. the settings menu are kind of awful. Not unusable. But every time I open a terminal and I deal with the choice of either having obscene padding around my content or seeing a few pixels of my prompt's corners shaved off, I get just a little more irritated, and a little less likely to pick up my Macbook the next time I'm deciding which device to use.

I got a Mac mini and was very positively surprised that it still ran the older version. I can use the size setting I'm comfortable with in the display menu. When I use Tahoe, I need to make the setting smaller to have a reasonable amount of apps open, but then it's uncomfortable to read.