I call Google's the Messy Desk Layout because it forgoes the function, order, and organization offered in a digital system to emulate the messiness of the real world. Stacked cards, the paper-layers-sliding-motion as you scroll down an app's page in the Play Store on your Android, and especially shoving all your Chrome tabs (my friend [...has problems, ok, but still...] regularly rolls with >50 chrome tabs open on his phone) into the Recents switcher (and poor guy isn't smart enough to figure out how to disable that feature in Chrome)...

anyways, my opinion is that tacit knowledge trumps nearly any level of design you can come up with. Users never look at the label or the picture of what they're interacting with, they remember it's spacial location in relation to the screen borders. For that reason, a good design should be chosen, and iteratively modified-- occasionally, but things should roughly always be in the same spot as before. This business of rewriting the entire presentation layer every year (Youtube app for example) is very mentally taxing and I have given up trying to learn how to use the new one. I suppose I'll figure it out eventually, but I can more productively spend my energy learning a new language. It is, literally, too hard for me to relearn everything to care about figuring out whatever the hell their UX engineers most recently pulled out of their ass.

The thing that really, really angers me is I used to have a keen perception of how a fluid, clean, efficient UI behaved, but as I've been forced to interact with poor designs I've lost that talent.

It's not just google, other products aren't designed as well as they were when I was younger, either. About half of my suggestions for usability improvements in google apps ('Send Feedback') have been implemented after I suggested them, and several within 2-4 weeks. This makes me cry at night. I had no idea what I had, and lost...

So anyways I basically don't update any apps anymore (they're always removing features or moving them anyways, why would I update if this one works fine?), and if I do and find the new interface too confusing I just track down an older APK online and make a mental note to never update that until I have the time and energy to learn the new layout.

bonus mentally-stimulating material: Windows XP's Explorer (likely back from the NT->2k days, and probably entirely thanks to IBM's role in NT development) had a great feature. You changed cursor focus in Windows Explorer with F6--but there were so many panes, so you would hold down F6 till you hit the one you want. Inevitably you were using List View, your hands were on the keyboard, and you were ready to start typing the name of the folder you wanted. The problem? There were so many panes that you'd always miss what you wanted due to the keyboard repeat rate. IBM's (or some other hero at MS) solution? Focus goes to main folder List View pane, to Link bar (ctrl+F6) above the folder List View, and then back to the List View pane. But why?
...because whoever made that decision knew that you were always going to miss it the first time, so they placed it twice so that you'd always hit it...genius...

As far as I can tell, these people don't exist anymore.