I completely disagree. Form over function worked so well at pushing technology further. The thinking was “what do I want to make”, now the thinking is “what can I make with what I have?”
My turn to disagree
When it comes to design and function, these things must be thought of in cooperation with one another.
As a professional whose workflow is impacted by the functional realities of the computers I use, I was handicapped by the previous generation of MBPs due, in part, to the insistence on 'all things serve the thinness master'. My maxed out 2019 MBP would spin up its fans sometimes just idling, and hitting it with any kind of a workload would cause it to start throttling, hard, unless I took unusual steps to avoid it. Intel definitely bears part of the responsibility here, but so too does the thin body design of that MBP which, in my experience, was too thin to allow for proper heat mitigation given the blowtorch of a CPU that was inside.
As an example, I created a set of 1.5" stilts that my MBP would sit on on my desk, creating a large air gap underneath. I then had a small desk fan that I had sitting next to the laptop, angled such that when I turned it on, it would blow through that gap, keeping the air under the laptop as cool as possible. That was the only way I was able to keep that machine from throttling when engaging in tasks that were part of my daily workflow. So, I had an essentially non-portable MBP while engaging in those tasks and constantly had not only the loud fans of the MBP running, but an external fan also running ... just to allow me to work.
Now that the design language is actually taking professional workloads in mind, my M1 Max MBP is able to handle virtually anything I throw at it without the fans even coming on. The two times I've heard them come on I was doing things that were excessively punishing. Even still, no throttling, partly due to the slightly thicker body.
This has been such an improvement to my day to day work cycle, and it's due, in part, to allowing the design language to be informed (at least in part) by the work flows and use-cases of people that are actually working these machines.