I believe the changes in Blender over the last few years (that I mostly dislike) have been driven by two factors: Big industry donors and a wave of new users due to increasingly widespread subscription business models. Both were driven to Blender for financial reasons, not its unique workflow or free software ideals. Still they formed something of a flashmob that demanded Blender be changed drastically. Now it has flat monochrome icons, incompatible files, a hog of a viewport renderer, completely different default keys and even left-click select by default! So I'm sticking to 2.79b. Its faults have not been fixed in the process anyway, which is what - in my opinion - should have been focussed on until the next major release.
In this specific case, changes were caused by existing reach, not a wish for more.