Illustrator 2025

I just wanted to say, IMHO, the latest version of Illustrator is a disaster. To make a login screen mockup, I placed a clipping path on an image and went to overlay text and some vector boxes (username and password form fields). Illustrator proceeded to lock/group the entire object so that editing was super difficult. To see if I could overcome this issue by placing the clipped image on a separate layer that I could lock. When I moved it to the new layer, it converted the text to vectors and now, I have to retype and format the text. What a mess. 

I never once grouped any of these objects.  I have been using Illustrator since version 1998, so I have a good idea of how a vector editing tool should behave. Something that should have taken 10 seconds has turned into this rant.