No they were better. Whether someone likes the style better or not (I do) they were FAR more visually distinct from each other which made it much easier to find the program you wanted to use.
Right now my dock is a soup of squircles. I have to scan multiple times to find icons even though I know roughly where they should be.
They aren’t distinct. They don’t stand out.
That was never a problem until last year. 40 years of Mac was fine. Then that.
There must be someone senior at Apple that still thinks the squircles look good, I dunno how we're still stuck with them. I haven't made a change to my dock in years and I have to hunt for apps nearly every time I open it. It doesn't help that a lot of newer apps seeming don't actually have a logo and are just happy with some random circular shaped blob.
Same people who thought text on translucent glass over text looked good.
Who thought that and lots of floating buttons was “getting out of the way of my content”.
Who thought sidebars should look like windows with mirrored content under them was smart.
Who thought long horizontal scrolling lists were easy to use.
Who never gave more than one window open at once.
Who are apparently illiterate and need icons everywhere and text nowhere.
They’ve lost the plot and I don’t care what they think. My machine is drastically harder to use than it was just two years ago all to make it “prettier“ even though personally I don’t think it is.
I remember getting interested in an app because of the icon looked nice. Also couldn't use apps if the icon was too ugly and spoiled my beautiful dock.