The style panel grows on its own. Every time something can't be expressed, the obvious fix is another control, and each one is individually reasonable. Then one day you open the panel and it's a wall.
We've removed several this year. Here's the reasoning, because "we simplified the UI" is the least useful sentence in software.
Two screens offering the same default
Settings had a "Default caption style" dropdown. Later we shipped saved styles — you build a look, name it, mark one as your default, and it gets applied to new uploads automatically.
So there were two places to set a default caption style, on adjacent screens, and they didn't mean quite the same thing. That isn't a preference, it's a bug that happens to render. We deleted the dropdown; the saved style wins, because it's the one that carries a whole look rather than a preset name.
The underlying column still exists and still seeds a video that has no saved style. It just isn't a thing you have to have an opinion about any more.
Find and replace, twice
The desktop Text panel had find-and-replace. It was genuinely useful and it was also the reason that panel had a horizontal scrollbar — two input fields and two buttons don't fit in a 340px rail without something giving.
We took it out on desktop. On phones, where the text sheet is full-width and there's room, it stayed. That looks inconsistent written down and it's right in use: the constraint that made it bad on desktop doesn't exist on a phone.
A control that's worth its space on one screen size can be a net loss on another. Shipping it in both places because it "should be consistent" is how panels get scrollbars.
What we didn't delete
It's easy to tell the simplification story as though fewer is always better, so: we added things too, and some of them are unglamorous.
The style panel gained an active-word row — colour, fill, or nothing — and a soft/hard shadow toggle. Neither is a control anyone asked for in the abstract. Both exist because without them two of the built-in looks can't be expressed at all, and a preset you can select but not modify is a dead end.
The test isn't the number of controls. It's whether each one is reachable from something a person was already trying to do.
What replaced them
Presets, mostly. There are thirty, and clicking one fills in every control below it — font, size, weight, colour, shadow, animation, position. It isn't a mode you're locked into; it's a starting point that leaves everything free afterwards.
That turns out to be the right shape for this kind of tool. Most people want a look, not a font size. The controls are there for the ones who want to move something two pixels, and they're no longer the first thing you see.