Apple love to preach "the UI gets out of the way of your content" with each new redesign, but how true is that in practice? Let's compare the total height of the Safari UI with a toolbar, favourites bar and tab bar visible, across the three latest Mac OS design languages – Yosemite, Big Sur and now Tahoe. I've added a red line for emphasis.
It sure looks to me like the UI is eating more into my content with each redesign.
Apple isn't alone in that. More and more sites and programs are become space inefficient.
Not all of us have dual 36" ultra high rez monitors for you to waste the space with more and more area round every element. I know you're proud of your UI design skillz, but it's getting really ducking annoying.
I had to send in a screenshot of one Google page for editing contacts. 90% of the screen was fixed sized menus and the contacts photo. The last 10% was a tiny scrollbars box for editing a very long list of options. The devs responded basically "meh", though a few months later it adjusted to be a bit better. Do they ever test anything that's not on a huge screen before rolling to prod?
I feel this way all the time. I used to have to tell my (often less experienced) coworkers "that's unusable on a device, which is how 75% of our traffic will consume it."
It was usually because it looked nice on a huge monitor, and in an emulator.