This may be old news to everyone, but I just noticed something about the horribly ugly login screens that started with (I think) Big Sur. It must be related to how the desktop and screen saver preferences have been set. When I choose a photo for the desktop, I get that as the background of my login screen at startup, If, however, I set the desktop image to change at one of the optional intervals, I get the pink and purple eye-stabbing default the next time I start up. This doesn’t apply to restarts, apparently.
The desktop is one of the main ways I look at my photos, and I always set it to change every minute. If I toggle that off before shutting down, I should be able to see an image I actually want to see next time I boot the computer.
I don’t have my desktop image set to change, so I won’t comment on the startup behavior, but I will comment on the “eye-stabbing” default wallpapers that started wih Big Sur.
When I first saw the glaring, distracting color schemes that Apple started forcing on most users (in practice, since most users don’t seem to change from the default wallpaper settings), I was reminded of the old interviews of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, where Jobs accused Microsoft of having “no taste” and Gates wished that he personally had Jobs’ design “taste”.
I thought those Big Sur wallpapers were the most obvious examples that at least parts of Apple had lost their sense of taste. Interestingly, that was around the time that Windows 11 preview releases were available, and Windows 11 default wallpapers actually were very…tasteful.