I think we're agreeing after the fog clears of remembering the details. To be more precise, after looking again the issue was, there was no way to use control-

I think we're agreeing after the fog clears of remembering the details. To be more precise, after looking again the issue was, there was no way to use control-z for multiple undo without remapping the keyboard. Looks like they finally fixed it: In older versions of Photoshop, you could only press Ctrl + Z once to undo your most recent change. If you wanted to undo more changes, you had to change the shortcut keys to Ctrl + Alt + Z. from version 20.0.0 (CC 2019) onwards, we can just press Ctrl + Z which makes things a little easier There was a blog post by a product engineering at adobe that lamented they had to stick with it for so long for legacy reasons. This supports your point that many parts of the UX would likely be much different given a modern clean sheet design.