Material 3 Expressive

> In many cases, we chose to exceed existing standards for tap target size, color contrast, and other important aspects that can make interfaces easier to use.

So now even more space is wasted, making interfaces harder to use, but yes, the less important metric "how much time does it take on first use to spot a button" will shoot through the roof of you make the button full screen width (10x faster!). Thought it will fail to capture the more important metric of time wasted scrolling since a simple message doesn't fully fit on screen

And of course there are no user customizations to rectify these usability errors...

PS A great example of this awesomeness in action: on https://m3.material.io/components/toolbars/guidelines they can't even fit 2 (two!) toolbar buttons fully because the huge left/right buttons and all the extra white space padding and margins prevent the button content from being seen.

But there is enough space to fit all 4 (or at least 3 depending on text size and icons) toolbar buttons, and even if one doesn’t fit fully you could show its partial text, so navigation would still be faster without having to press the scroll button first and then the toolbar button

In my view, peak design is the "density" setting in Gmail where you could select between 3 degrees of density and wasted space in the UI.

Even though I like somewhat denser interfaces, I know that lots of whitespace is GREAT for new users. Just like I know everything needs to be in the UI (~80-90% of users click the undo button instead of typing Ctrl+Z in many apps). There has to be space for a learning curve for any interface.

The ability to make things denser is important, but high density is usually only relevant for power users. It should not be the benchmark by which a UI is judged.

EDIT: Actual ctrl+z statistic is inaccurate. Details included in a further comment.