Simple, Smart, and Secure: The next step in sharing files in Microsoft 365

I agree that this has made the UI cleaner and the experience easier, but it has also increased link management overhead and reduced granularity.

I deal with a lot of clients who have the below scenario and need to deal with it over several million files and folders in Sharepoint Online and this has made it a night mare.

Using the RACI matrix as a high level template.
I could share a view only link without expiry to a group that needs to be informed.
I could share a reviewer link with fixed expiry to a group that needs to be contributors.

I could share an editor link to those that need to be reponsible or accountable.
A user/group could have been setup via all 3 links for planned permission lifecycle setup right from the start.

In the past, I could do this at the start and leave it and not worry about the permission per user as it was managed based on the link and their group membership.
Now as there is only one link per document/file/folder, each identity (user or group) can have only one entry, which means that each of this needs to be managed on an ongoing basis which has increased the administrative overhead job very significantly and can also cuase lack of continoty related issues which means that access to critical information can no longer be reliably managed in SharePoint Online without significant additional overhead.