Apple design nowadays should be something we point to and laugh at, not something to imitate.
Apple lost the plot on design after Steve Jobs died and Jony Ive assumed full control.
It's not Jony Ive's fault. That's the nature of their partnership, he created and Steve Jobs edited. Ive, of all people, probably lost the most when Steve Jobs died.
It's all been downhill ever since. Ousting Jony Ive and putting Alan Dye in charge didn't help.
The problem remains: there's no longer an editor in charge.
Apple fans like to think that they've recovered a little since the iOS 7 debacle, but in reality it's just self delusion.
I've been running the beta on my phone for a while ago, and I pretty much forgot about it. The new design works really well and is much less obtrusive than you'd imagine. Those few bad moments posted from the first dev beta have all been resolved now.
It still has plenty of consistency errors and issues for the devs. But even if they fix all the bugs, I still think the UI changes are regressive: now things are buried in even more icons; the menus warp, change color, and move in distracting ways; and text on button and menus have never been harder to read.
I don't know much about Gemini beyond a cursory look, but I don't think inline media is impossible. IIUC it is up to the Gemini client to decide if it displays media inline.
My understanding is that Gemini clients don't display inline media in order to defeat privacy-compromising techniques such as tracking pixels. A Gemini client could very reasonably decide to show images inline if they are larger than 16x16 for instance.
You must be a fan of Subversion then. On a more serious note, I'm sure I've seen this (any unique shortenings standing in for the whole word) in an actual language at some point, and it was infuriating.
Sounds like a junior reporter trying to hit a word count.