WordPress shipped a redesigned administration interface last month, and a meaningful share of its most experienced users are unhappy about it, which is a strange position for a piece of software to be in immediately after making itself easier to use.
The new interface is genuinely better for the person installing WordPress for the first time. Navigation is clearer, the writing screen has more room, and functions that used to be scattered across half-remembered menu positions now sit somewhere findable. Judged purely as an onboarding experience, this is an improvement, and I do not think that is seriously contested.
The complaints are coming from a different population entirely, people who have used this software daily for years, built muscle memory around exactly where every button used to sit, and now have to relearn a workflow they had stopped consciously thinking about. That kind of friction is real even when the destination is objectively better, because expertise is partly built out of not having to look, and a redesign takes that away regardless of how sound the new arrangement is.
This is the same problem every mature tool eventually runs into, and it has no clean solution. Optimize purely for the newcomer, and you erode the experience of the people who have carried the product’s reputation and written its plugins for years. Optimize purely for the veteran and the software calcifies around habits that make no sense to anyone arriving fresh, and new users stop arriving.
What convinces me this was the right call, regardless of the noise, is who WordPress is actually trying to serve going forward. A tool aiming to be the default way ordinary people publish on the web has to keep optimizing for the person who has never seen it before, because that population is enormous and permanent, while the frustrated power users are a comparatively small group who will most likely adapt within a few weeks and forget they were ever annoyed.
The complaints are loud right now because the people making them are also disproportionately the people who write about software for a living. I would treat that as a sample bias worth remembering rather than a verdict on whether the redesign itself was right.