The current state does not feel malicious in this way to me at all. It feels bumbling and amateurish. It gives the feeling that the people who kept the product cohesive have left or retired, and that a new generation of overly ambitious careerists have entered positions of leadership.
What do you mean by "largely the mindset they have"? I think the comment you're replying to is right, most Apple execs probably have jobs that can be done entirely on iPads, so none of the complaints by power users about macOS resonate at all (and this group is sadly far too small of a minority to have any financial impact).
I think any organization at Apple's scale has no shortage of skilled workers and ambitious careerists. But at the product level, I do believe that the result you see is generally an honest reflection of the organization's priorities.
If Apple wanted to ship a rock-solid OS, they could. They're just choosing to put those resources elsewhere.
I feel like it says a lot, when intelligent amorality seems genuinely preferable to blundering incompetence. Many such cases. One wonders how much "enshittification" is intrinsic to networked software and our late-stage-whatever political economy, versus how much is a farcical byproduct of office politics and org chart turf wars.
I’m convinced leadership at Apple are not power users. They’ve never put MacOS through their paces, or did any development themselves it seems. If they did they would have found all of the bugs and irregularities and huge performance problems themselves.