Jeez, it's an accessibility feature and they just turned it off!
I don't mind liquid glass and can handle the transparency mostly, but the notifications are just god-awful and difficult to read (white on light glass, using dark mode, who comes up with this stuff?).
But reducing transparency is a much harder setting now (should be "removing transparency"), I don't like it anymore, it also messes with the wallpaper. The previous setting was just right for me. Now the app squares are just black, very bad with dark icons.
Your saying the "reduce transparency" setting changed between 26 and 27?
I've been running it since 18 (first thing I do is go into accessibility and turn off any animations and screen effects that take GPU cycles)
Yes it changed, first it reduced the transparency in many places, most notably in notifications, and made the glass dark. Now it makes the glass just a black plastic, but also in the launcher, where dark icons don't pop out anymore.
The old setting was the perfect balance for me. Ah well, iPhone 12 mini is nearly dead, am eyeballing something with GrapheneOS anyway...