Setting up a Big Sur machine for someone, and I'm utterly shocked by how this got through to customers without being killed in a preliminary design meeting...
For the whole history of the Mac UI (and pretty much every other operating system), menus functioned in more or less the same way - the menu was a fixed left position, aligned with the action word's hit zone in the menubar. The menu had empty gutter down each side, and that gutter was used to provide space on the left for ticks if indicating an item was a toggle-able status / check item, and a right margin to place submenu arrows or keyboard shortcuts.
The words in the menu dropdown were indented right, to provide for that left gutter.
Big Sur aligns the text for the dropdown menu words directly under the main menu item... and then extends the lefthand edge of the menu leftwards to create a gutter on a menu if there is a ticked item in that menu, so going through the menus one after another, the leftmost edge of the dropdown can shift in relation to the main menu word, from menu to menu.
It literally breaks my brain that someone thought this was acceptable.
For the whole history of the Mac UI (and pretty much every other operating system), menus functioned in more or less the same way - the menu was a fixed left position, aligned with the action word's hit zone in the menubar. The menu had empty gutter down each side, and that gutter was used to provide space on the left for ticks if indicating an item was a toggle-able status / check item, and a right margin to place submenu arrows or keyboard shortcuts.
The words in the menu dropdown were indented right, to provide for that left gutter.
Big Sur aligns the text for the dropdown menu words directly under the main menu item... and then extends the lefthand edge of the menu leftwards to create a gutter on a menu if there is a ticked item in that menu, so going through the menus one after another, the leftmost edge of the dropdown can shift in relation to the main menu word, from menu to menu.
It literally breaks my brain that someone thought this was acceptable.