It was death by a thousand cuts. I am not a designer and Tahoe bothered me enough that, after trying it at work, I've been actively stopping my personal Mac to update, and it was a factor in moving to android.

Dead canary

You have to make accommodation for designers, that's simply their language. If something is misaligned by 1 pixel, it's not an annoyance, it's a catastrophe.

The icons were bad, but the real issue with the new theme is the waste of space and wasting time computing transparencies.