Unfortunately, they do make little changes. The largely visible UI changes are there to hide those small little changes.

Changes that remove little features that nobody would notice immediately, until someone needs it and realises it's gone, or someone wants it the first time and is unable to find it, later finding out in older forum posts, that it was actually there in earlier versions and worked perfectly.
These little features are the kinds that provide power to the user while not particularly making a big difference in the companies' wallets.

If they really had a lot of Dev time and wanted to do something useful, they would have read wishlist reports from users for little additions that would help them. But that does not happen.

I understand this is not a "Dull Men's" answer, but sometimes things need to be said. And this seemed like the correct point.

My email provider did this again and it just keeps getting uglier and more dysfunctional with each iteration.

No, I don’t want my emails separated by what your stupid AI thinks what group they’re part of. Quit trying to force this crap on me.

Every email provider seems to be doing this and it is so obnoxious.

This just happened to Adobe Illustrator for me.

Firefox on Android just did this to me. No noticeable improvement, but definitely made it less productive and frustrating to me.

It's «its».