So I just installed Microsoft Teams for a thing, and I've already been noticing the fairly bizarre turn in their corporate illustration styles but it's on a whole new level here. It has a really harsh lighting style with very deep shadows and very bright spot lighting, which already makes the bright shapes feel kinda crappy like they're glaring at you and obscuring a lot of silhouettes, but it's made all the worse by the heavy bevelled and embossed elements which just really adds another layer to how unreadable everything is. My brain feels like it's chasing the ghost of the most basic UI icons.
It also feels like it's actively obscuring crappy compositions too - like the first picture is just a bell with a bunch of boxes and I have to squint at it and spend a couple of seconds parsing it all out in my head.
You can have rendering techniques like this and make the shapes a lot more readable, such a macOS Big Sur's app icons. Just... bewildering content and bewildering and overproduced execution.