What do you mean “now”? Google Photos has had a photo editing feature for a very long time now

The package name is visible in App info, no need to install anything - just long press the app icon, pick App info and scroll down to version

That indeed is a Bluetooth feature that supposedly makes audio quality better by only lowering the volume using the actual speaker driver instead of doing it digitally and potentially throwing away some quiet sounds. In theory, doing it this way is always better and should be preferred. In practice, many devices handle it terribly.

If you want to turn the feature off, you can enable developer options on your phone (settings -> About phone -> tap Build number a bunch of times) and turn off absolute volume. That will give you back software volume control with fine-grained adjustments.

The CPU is still Google’s Tensor, and the modem on current Pixels is already a blackbox that custom ROMs interact with using binary blobs ripped from the official ROM. There isn’t much that could get worse with this change.

Google Drive app -> New (in the bottom right corner) -> Scan. It’s not supposed to be a part of the camera app, that’s just a useful shortcut.

That sounds like Xiaomi. The best price to performance ratio of any OEM, but at the cost of terrible software and this… experience… when you want to get rid of it.

Worth noting that not all OEMs are like this.

Even Linux is slowly moving to an immutable system like Android. It is simply the best approach for an OS that non-technically-inclined people use - it’s much harder to screw up beyond repair by accident - and clearly the future of operating systems (well, future for Linux at least, mobile platforms and maybe macOS are already there).