I certainly don’t like this but I also never liked the hamburger menu either.

its a split pea soup menu now.

The funny thing about the "Hamburger Menu" is that the term is well known to people in the design and software developer spaces but not to anybody else. You can't count on telling people "click on the on Hamburger Menu" and know what they're supposed to click on.

Knowing Google, they changed the function of the hamburger menu, but didn't bother changing the tool tip to match. To corporate UI developers, accessibility is a begrudging concession to users who are unable to decode a design with the correct trendy look to it, and have to fall back to the wrong look, just because it's usable.

Occasionally you'll get a corporate UI designer bold enough to only show a bunch of vague skeuomorphic-inspired icons, with no hint whatsoever to their function, but I am heartened to see that it is rare, with most menu buttons opening actual menus, with actually useful text.

If the menu itself is text, there's no reason not to make the menu button text, but I guess it's a worthwhile compromise to limit corporate UI designers to a single unintuitive layer in the user interface, giving them the trendy look they want, at least before any buttons are pressed, while only requiring users to guess and check through that single layer of a useless interface, with everything after the first button press being useful text.

I do wish the trend of floating buttons would end; with them often making it impossible to see what's behind them, causing harm even to users who never need their functionality.