I'm not very fond of Material You.

Just no.

A lot of things with Material You just don't work in certain cases.

Like on AMOLED phones; when you have an AMOLED phone, you might want to use dark mode, in true black, but Material You apps (especially Google's, I think. Again, I don't have Google apps) generally don't have an AMOLED option. Even if they did, it doesn't look as legible as regular Material You, with all the shapes and borders disappearing, and that large padding making it hard to find which buttons are which.

More on that padding, it's just too much. Too much padding, too much round corners. And that is just placed everywhere. It's like using large bread slices for buttons. That might be useful for those with large, fat fingers (which I do not have, they only fit the long aspect of that description), but GNOME has nice large buttons without going too far with that padding. Maybe it has something to do with phones getting larger and larger over time (and it doesn't help that they only grow vertically instead of growing with the old 16:9 aspect ratio), to the point that you need two hands to operate one without difficulty, defeating the point of having an easy to use hand(not pluralised)-operated computer in your pocket. Might as well just ditch your phone and get a tablet at this point. One of Material You's goals (if I remember correctly) is to make it fit on any phone, but I feel that's just rubbish for those with small screens, with the padding making it difficult to make anything fit while having the buttons fit for large fingers.

It just does not work for me. Unfortunately, it's a design standard now and every app developer on Android is planning on (or is) using it. Again, it's not for me specifically, and others may think the same for themselves and others just don't mind it. But you'd think they would have also listened to the minority when they decided to develop a design language made for every user out there. One size fits all, and this is clearly not that size.