It was not. Probably one of the biggest UI regressions of my lifetime on par with Windows 7 -> Windows 8. The iOS 7 design is so limiting in what it can communicate that it took Apple several major releases to make the iOS shift key's state legible to users. Arguably, they still haven't nailed it. I also find the idea that's iOS 7 is minimalistic comical, since information density dropped in most applications after the transition in favor of white space padding (necessary because the boundaries between UI and content were no longer obvious).
I found iOS 7 to be a long overdue cleanup in the skeuomorphic design that had gone too far. I agree that revisions were necessary – but at least it was a step in the right direction. Liquid Glass seems like a step towards bloat and gloss with obvious usability downsides and no obvious advantages to the current design system.
Just because skeuomorphism had gone too far, doesn't mean that ditching it completely was the right move. A step in the right direction would have been removing the rich, corinthian leather from the calendar app. What we got was a total obliteration of affordances that made the UI easy to understand and intuit.
This problem persists to this day, probably because there is no clear way to indicate intractability in the post iOS 7 design language. For example, I was recently confused by where a setting in macOS had gone until I realized the (i) icons in some settings panels are clickable and bring up an additional setting modal (example from the Battery settings [1]). WTF!? There's no indication that this is a button at all - you either know this is a button or you don't.
And there's my perpetual bugbear - information density. Apparently it's getting worse again[2] with liquid glass, but iOS 7 was the original sin here. Removing affordances necessitated using whitespace to separate controls from each other and from content in many places because you have nothing else - but this means a dense, compact UI is often no longer possible.
It was not. Probably one of the biggest UI regressions of my lifetime on par with Windows 7 -> Windows 8. The iOS 7 design is so limiting in what it can communicate that it took Apple several major releases to make the iOS shift key's state legible to users. Arguably, they still haven't nailed it. I also find the idea that's iOS 7 is minimalistic comical, since information density dropped in most applications after the transition in favor of white space padding (necessary because the boundaries between UI and content were no longer obvious).