> The side bar, such as on Finder, just kind of floats there. That is fine and looks kind of neat on the Maps app as you can see some of the maps behind it, but on the Finder it is just a white bubble over top of a white background, which... is a choice.

Agreed. All of the transparency and liquid glass effects look terrible when they're displayed over a solid color, especially white. That said, they look good over top of something colorful and really AMAZING when displayed over something that's moving (video, whatever).

I imagine that the effect REALLY takes off on a display where EVERYTHING is moving, like on top of the real world on a VisionOS display. It's just out of place on MacOS when uses as a dev workstation.