And no Steve Jobs to pull them down to earth.

Steve Jobs, of course, was always involved in the details of programming languages targeting his platform.

He would probably raise hell about the state of the new macOS Setting window though. How this thing made it through QA remains a mystery.

He really was involved. As I understand it Obj-C was championed by him. NextSTEP was largely software related:

https://youtu.be/Hu-jvAWTZ9o?si=PalSP6POofiRuj3a

I still feel like GUI programming hasn’t progressed in the years since this. Actually they’ve regressed in many ways.

I wasn't there so I can't say for sure.

But my impression watching from the outside is that he had a finger in every pie.

Best designed? Really? Support for something as basic as consistent integer types across platforms is non-existent.