[Cortexiphan]

There are certainly some inconsistencies in BMW’s design language, but whatever you think of the styling, it’s hard to argue with the results. BMW is arguably the only major success story outside of Tesla and the Chinese manufacturers over the past decade.
BMW has never been stronger in terms of sales, customer satisfaction, critical acclaim, and reliability. We literally had a list of know issues for every model before F chassis. New models are competing with Japanese manufacturers in terms of reliability - which was impossible before. The idea was Japanese play safe that's why they're reliable. BMW doesn't play safe, but still is.
And the people claiming BMWs are no longer about the driving experience are FOS. BMWs remain among the best-driving vehicles in their respective classes. The B58/ZF8 combination is potentially one of the greatest ICE powertrains ever made, and they're still improving it! Suspension tuning, xdrive tuning are also pretty much perfect in every new model. And BMW’s EVs are among the best-driving and most well-rounded EVs in their classes as well.

Also, even though it seems to be a popular opinion that newer BMWs are somehow worse, the reality is pretty much the opposite, it's not the popular opinion outside of social media. When we're online, we’re just sitting in a cesspool of naysayers, and bitter, nostalgia-driven people yelling about how everything used to be better. Step outside that bubble and look at the real world—and the actual data—and a very different picture emerges. Virtually every new BMW is objectively better than the model it replaced in the ways that actually matter. ( I’d argue there’s only one real exception: the M5 ) There are so many examples of this. Take the new X3: the same trolls who constantly complain that “BMW isn’t about driving anymore” will obsess day and night over a plastic button on the door, while completely ignoring that the new X3 is faster, more compliant, better to drive, and more efficient.
In other words, it’s better in virtually every area they keep insisting BMW is supposed to be about. But they can’t complain about the way it drives—so suddenly, the hill they’re willing to die on is a plastic button on the door.

BMWs golden era is the present, and I’d buy almost any BMW in the lineup today in a heartbeat. The only exceptions for me are the MINI-platform variants—the X1, X2, and 2 Series Gran Coupe.