Wow I didn't realize that. Though since the re-skin caused a huge number of popular Electron apps to have big performance issues... it didn't seem that performance/optimization focused to me.
I’m being sarcastic of course - this isn’t a Snow Leopard release and it wasn’t marketed as such. There are in fact new features in v26: live translations and a revamped Spotlight. But these are treated almost as footnotes, with most of the advertising devoted to Liquid Glass: https://www.apple.com/os/macos/
Worth noting Snow Leopard also had new features, most notably the App Store. But it was marketed as a performance upgrade. v26 / Tahoe’s new features (excluding the UI reskin) are comparably small. But instead it is a massive slowdown & bloat release :(
[I get your point; I just refuse to consider to a ridiculous reskin no one asked for to be a “feature.”]