Earlier quoted context omitted.
> cleaning up and using a consistent design language across platforms This is not a positive. A laptop is not a big iPhone and shouldn't use the same design language. One of the worst thing about Windows 10 is its use of huge, touch-friendly interfaces in an OS most commonly used with a keyboard and mouse. MacOS appears to be headed the same way (and it doesn't even support touch screens).
Per Fitz's Law, touch-friendly is mouse friendly. The larger the click target the faster and easier it is to click, especially as the distance between the current mouse position and the target increases. It's a huge mouse accessibility win to design touch-first target sizes, and there's decades of UX research on that topic. Just because the mouse is precise enough to do it doesn't mean that users should have to "360…
That's only true to an extent. It stops being true when the low-density UI re-design forces the user to take more actions to accomplish the same task. If I have to dig through a deeper menu structure, or flip back an forth between pages instead of having the information all on-screen at once, that change is touch-friendly but hostile to desktop and many laptop users.