Apple love to preach "the UI gets out of the way of your content" with each new redesign, but how true is that in practice? Let's compare the total height of the Safari UI with a toolbar, favourites bar and tab bar visible, across the three latest Mac OS design languages – Yosemite, Big Sur and now Tahoe. I've added a red line for emphasis.
It sure looks to me like the UI is eating more into my content with each redesign.
I can say i have experienced that occasionally, but it had less to do with being hard to read visually and more to do with just not caring about what I'm reading. Which seems less of a "We need to make this easier to read" and more a "We need to trick people into thinking they're reading something meaningful" problem.
Is it something to do with shortsightedness? Maybe an ADHD thing that somehow doesn't affect me for some reason? Maybe just I'm super good at basic visual spatial orientation?
Or is it just that people read with such small text that it's hard to differentiate between lines? I honestly can't fathom an inability to read a line in any other circumstances.