Very much so, I hold this view as someone who reads a bit of Critical Theory; Catherine Liu recently makes a case for this as well as disparate other public intellectuals from Chomsky to Zizek have also generally critiqued CT academics, postmodernists, etc. The basic argument is something like, Frankfurt School itself had a tension over their primary text (Dialectic of Enlightenment) by Adorno and one faction basically got totally divorced from Marxist ideas, and the result of that was bad theories and bad praxis and then even worse being coopted as a capitalist intelligentsia. See also Thomas Picketty's Brahmin Left. I'm oversimplifying but there is a continued strain of this criticism (albeit largely on deaf ears).

I miss having snappy menubar lists, at the Apple Store yesterday I noticed on the Neo that the transparencies and iconified menu items with shortcut glyphs are still perceptibly less buttery smooth.

It has even regressed, I'm still on my High Sierra 2011 MacBook Air, but on my mom's M3 Air I can't help but observe that they did all that engineering to reduce the black bezel around the lid, only for Tahoe to have overly rounded windows and huge title bars.

It is giving me choice paralysis, last week I made a mental graph of the ones I wanted and went over all node pairs choose 2, now it's down to waiting for a fall M5 Mac mini paired with either: a MacBook Neo, or an iPad Air 13"; both options are very attractive for my intended usage though the latter seems higher risk since I've never used a 13 inch tablet before.

I woke up to see my other comment downvoted by some rando, but I honestly think this is the best line in the entire article and Gruber's wish is telling (I quote the line only here, but it is best read in context of the original passage):

"I wish Apple would make a MacBook that’s akin to the iPhone Air — crazy thin and surprisingly performant."

What this reflects is all those comments and users, myself included, over the years saying "I would get an iPad if only it could run MacOS", and the ensuing discussion to the effect of why Apple won't do it, the chips are just as powerful, etc. A tablet Mac is a lot of people's (both casual and tech) holy grail in portable computing, justified/sensible or not in terms of technology and UI form factor. Gruber's wish is precisely the expression of this not unpopular sentiment. And also the Tahoe iPad OS features is a clue that Apple knows this.