Hi Emily,
I think the biggest takeaway of the changes to the UI isn’t actually the changes but how Webflow rolled the changes out.
People who had deadlines to hit were suddenly faced with an updated UI with things moved and things working differently - this probably caused people to miss deadlines because they had to adapt to the new changes.
With design software (figma, sketch, photoshop, etc) you have the ability to CHOOSE when you update to the latest version so you have time to adjust. Forcing this update upon your users has probably made more people have a negative reaction to it, and it also feels extremely mismanaged.
Even with web apps, most of the time you get the option to try the changes before they roll them out to all users. Facebook is particularly good at this. I think this would have enabled you to get some decent feedback before forcing the update on all users. It would have also warned users that a substantial UI update was coming instead of springing it on them.
With all this being said, the new UI needs some pretty drastic updates and they need to be rapidly implemented. At the moment it feels like Webflow is sitting on their hands.
Webflow cannot treat their end product users as beta users.