Not having yet moved away from Sequoia but reading threads like this one, I come away with the impression there is more than “leaning” and a lot more than “a tad” awful. Not yet unusable, but certainly off-putting, change for change sake, harder to use, disconcertingly cumbersome, flaunting successful UI design guidelines, and all with a soupçon of ensh!ttification thrown in for additional annoyance. Does that cover it? Still staying on Sequoia regardless.
I switched back to Sequoia from Tahoe because of bugs after a complete flat reinstall of Tahoe (formatted drive, copied files to external drive and back to My Documents/Music/Photos, manually reinstalled all apps without using backups and configured them manually without configuration files). Never downgraded my MacOS version before, and I use a MacBook Air M1, not exactly an esoteric device.
On the Tahoe GUI side I found buttons hidden under other UI elements or moved without warning, but it was unpredictable. For Example, accessing network drives in finder has a grey bar under the toolbar showing connection status and username. The disconnect button is on the right side, and it would randomly move to under the Preview Pane. 7 out of 10 times it would be there and the other times I would need to start hiding panels or force-quitting finder to get it back.
On the internals side, one example: Time Machine broke. As in it kept trying to continuously backup several hundred gigs even if I left it just idle on my desk for hours without internet (blocked my mac from internet access to see if it was downloading things in the background, it wasn't). I let it complete it once, and then it backed up another 500 gigs, and another, and another before I quit. Format drive, use different drive, remote drive, local drive plugged directly into the mac, dis/enable Time Machine all had the same thing happen.
In my experience if you're doing very basic tasks like editing text documents without complex graphics or browsing websites it will work 'just fine'. But anything more complex (I mainly do databases, statistics, and data science) causes odd behaviour. It wouldn't be bad if it was predictable, but it's not and that results in a weird anxiety from mentally tracking your computer because you can't trust it. Tahoe made me not want to use my Mac. I literally did not buy the M5 MacBook Pro over Christmas because Tahoe is pre-installed and cannot be downgraded since its new hardware.
So Tahoe works, yes.
But look at your use case and decide before you upgrade. Only a genuinely stupid person who has no sense of abstract thought, introspection, or capability to critically analyse would say Tahoe's doing just fine and it's their opinion that it's ready for the majority of complex workflows. It's laughable to suggest that anyone should just put up with the OS in its current form or wait for a future update if they're experiencing issues - We're 6 months out from WWDC and the rumour mill is constantly saying that this is a 'Snow Leopard year' for MacOS instead of building on-top of Tahoe for the next version.
