I think attempts to constrain power creep harshly have more negative impacts on games than accepting power creep, or best of all, accepting it and bringing older stuff up to spec.
This applies across a wide variety of games, not just D&D. As such "meh".
I mean, we knew the modularity was dead from the later bits of the playtest. They'd obviously given up and gone full "apology edition". What was released was essentially a game that leaned pretty hard in a specific direction.
But that wasn't how people played it. As you can see from Critical Role and so on. People don't play 5E the way it was designed to be played, and because the influence of the modular concept stayed with 5E until fairly late in the design process, 5E actually played pretty okay when not being played "as intended".
What 5E is doing now is a course-correction in the way it was an apology edition earlier on. Having realized the majority of players are new, and aren't really looking for a 6-8 encounters/day dungeon crawl experience with a rather trad D&D setting and but rather something more lively and varied WotC are once again aiming at the largest possible body of players. The reason the other elements are being "left out" is is solely that they're incompatible with neo-trad. It's notable that WotC don't seem to be going after a lot of cruft or clumsy design that isn't incompatible with that (though perhaps I will change my tune when we see DND2024 in its full glory).