Its not just touch screens vs physical controls. Far to many of the recent cars with buttons are designed by people who apparently never drove the automobile in question. For example, AC fan controls were in the past simple sliders, or knobs, you could crank it to max when one enters a hot car, then put it at the 25% (or whatever speed) without taking your eyes off the road, in a matter of a fraction of a second placing, what was usually a unique control, in a particular position.
These days the digitization of everything means that modern cars with physical controls usually have up/down buttons to change the fan speed or temp. So like the Ford Flex I rented recently, you can't tell from touching the physical control whether the fan is at max speed, so the sequence is, look on the console for the right button (because there are were a half dozen or so identical buttons next to each other), hold it down, while listening to the fan speed until it sounds like its stopped getting faster. Then when you want to slow down, one has to look/feel for the button, hold it for a second or two until it seems to be roughly at the right speed, try not to over/unershoot because its laggy/etc.
Some of this is the result of climate controls designed to hold a given temp rather than setting the fan speed directly, where the assumption is the fan will run at max until it reaches it set point. But that is annoying in a whole other set of cases, including the one where the car isn't doing a good job of circulating the air causing a hotspot on the sunny side/etc. On my wife's car I find myself pushing the climate controls to max cool when I get in because its trying to run in "silent" mode, or waiting for the AC to come up to full pressure and I want it to cool down faster, then I have to look at the controls to reset it back to something reasonable when it finally starts to reach a comfortable temp.