Great, we have gone from a horrible and extremely unsafe design to a bad and mildly unsafe design.
What happened to the ~5 decades of design ranging from "decent" to "great"? Even the worst-designed dashboard of the early 00s was better than what we have now in many cases. Give me my damn knobs back.
I was going to agree, from the description above, that this was still a bad design.
But having looked at the picture, it seems fine. There are four sets of buttons that do different things. It will take negligible time to locate the one you want, after which you can stop looking at the panel. The buttons won't move and you'll be aware when you've pressed them.
Well designed button layouts use tactile differences so you can non-visually identify where you are without conducting a sequential search. Button clusters are restricted to groups of three or two with distinctive shapes or raised features that permit rapid acquisition of the intended button. You can't do that with a uniform, flush button strip. That's just designer wannabe BS where form is everything and function is ignored.
I think clearly Hyundai have taken an approach that improves dramatically on the 'buttons hidden behind touchscreens' menus' which has started to plague cars with touch screens.
The result is a dashboard that has decent form and decent function as opposed to great form terrible function. They aren't going for impeccable function here.
When a company tries to do the right thing and publicly calls out flaws in design iterations that we have disliked, lets not shoot them down for not getting it perfect.
To say its "form is everything where function is ignored" is just an overreaction.
With a row of buttons, you can count and you do not need visual attention.
With a screen, instead, you must look even to understand whether you are on a clickable object at all!