[microtonal]

This seems quite out of character for minor macOS releases. Yes, stuff breaks, but seldomly so broadly in a minor release.

Speculation about why: Apple had to push out a major iOS update before March 6 for the EU DMA deadline. They had almost two years to prepare, but they figured out fairly late that they could not negotiate (most of) their way out of it. So the weeks/months before the release, probably most of the focus of the OS (and infrastructure) teams was on the March 6 deadline.

I imagine that they had all security updates rolled into the macOS 14.4 and iOS 17.4 branches already. Then when March 6 came around, they released iOS 17.4 and they had to rush out macOS 14.4 as well (macOS 14.4 was already a day later than iOS 17.4, which is untypical for Apple), to avoid that bad actors find macOS vulnerabilities by looking at iOS changes.