I'd put the source of a quality decline as the cumulative effect of the yearly OS release cadence. The schedule doesn't leave nearly enough time for feature development, testing, and then bug fixes based on the testing. At the end of the summer the OSes get declared "zero bugs" which really just means a bunch of bugs get punted back to the originator asking for reproduction or extra documentation. By this time no one has time for try reproducing the bug unless it's really egregious. So the new OS just has a bunch of new bugs and rarely do any of the bugs from the previous release get fixed unless they're particularly egregious or security issues.
This leaves a lot of little bugs sitting around that might only affect say 1% of the user base but every bug is usually a different 1%. So almost everyone ends up running into annoying bugs for their particular usage/workflow. A secondary effect are big mid-cycle releases like iOS 16.4 which end up bundling features likely meant for the 16.0 release in the fall but slipped. Unfortunately due to the crunch they get the same level of testing/bug fixing as the fall point releases.
The building doesn't lead to poor software quality, that's a failure of scheduling/planning on the part of management. The shitty building just puts the software development on Hard Mode.
This leaves a lot of little bugs sitting around that might only affect say 1% of the user base but every bug is usually a different 1%. So almost everyone ends up running into annoying bugs for their particular usage/workflow. A secondary effect are big mid-cycle releases like iOS 16.4 which end up bundling features likely meant for the 16.0 release in the fall but slipped. Unfortunately due to the crunch they get the same level of testing/bug fixing as the fall point releases.
The building doesn't lead to poor software quality, that's a failure of scheduling/planning on the part of management. The shitty building just puts the software development on Hard Mode.