What is Google doing with their new UX?

Every iteration is designed to improve some metric so somebody can get promoted. It doesn't matter if it ruins the overall experience, somebody's pushing a metric.

At this point I wonder if they just do this shit to see how many people subscribe to it so they can laugh at our expense.

As a contract software engineer that works with UI/UX designers across multiple industries and technologies, Google's suggested UI/UX is typically not used.

Do you mean Material Design? It's getting a lot of hate, but for most apps, I actually really like it. On my computer, I would hate it and I don't like the Gnome's simplified design for example, but on my phone, I want most of the apps to be simple utilities and Material Design seems to fit that very well.

There are a lot of idiots out there. It is likely that they are trying to design for them.

I am degoogeled with the exception for YT. Mind to share an example?

What do you mean? What happened? Which Google product?

makes it harder to switch to alternatives, windows does the same

This is some low effort shitposting. Ambiguous say Google is bad, refuse to elaborate, collect upvotes.

Could you provide examples of where you feel its been dumbed down? Some areas such as the number of quick toggle buttons in the notifications, I agree. Other areas I feel like it's matured pretty well.

NewPipe is still using Google, just not their app. A lot of us do that, I assume including OP.

They are dumbing down to the point that I almost feel like I'm an Apple consumer using iDevice

probably the same thing they've been doing to their old UX.

letting engineers design it instead of hiring UX designers