There seems to be widespread disdain for it. AFAIK they switched to a shared codebase to make it easy for the devs to deploy to multiple devices. But, it came at the expense of UX for pretty much all devices. They don’t use native video services on things like iPhone.

It's not unusable on my shield but it's definitely worse. Not just 'change is bad' worse, but actually worse.

Selecting a season and then the episode gives you the episode summary instead of just playing the episode.

Hitting back on an episode brings up a side menu sometimes and others it leaves the episode like it should.

Why Plex?

I use Pleezy which has been a nice open source alternative to the Plex UI. The only issue we've had is that on wake, you have to press back once to do anything else. I'll eventually debug it and see if I can fix it.

The new UI version never made it to the Xbox client so that's what I switched to using about 6 months ago. As a bonus, I got to ditch my Roku altogether.

Yes, its completely unusable on my fire stick. I ended up sideloading the old apk.

There's a few alternative jellyfin clients that are really good and fast.

Plex has been enshittified since at least 2021. Most moved to Jellyfin.