My conquest in pursuit of making Android 12 pull-down thing look less like a knock-off Simple-Dimple toy is almost complete. Some things are still bad about this system, but at least it's bearable to look at now and I'm not using OS build from two years ago, it was poor from security perspective.
I made it tone down on the roundness and brought back transparency and blurs. Thanks to the excellent Iconify customization app and its developer. Some of this stuff is not even in the stable build yet.