Many of the issues, such as overheating, buggy/jittery animations (e.g. lockscreen swipe), and poor readability have been (mostly) fixed with the latest betas.
My biggest complaint was, when swiping down to see notifications, the lock screen background would not show up until it was fully swiped down. The notifications are still adjusted for the dark lock screen background, however, so the notifications are unreadable if I have a light background app running (e.g. a website). This has been fixed with the latest betas as the lock screen background appears right when you swipe, meaning notifications are still readable. Hooray!
The control center is less transparent, so it's readable now. My phone still heats up a bit more than normal, but it's a lot better than the first beta, where it got very toasty. The 3D "spatial" effect for photos is pretty cool but it's the kind of thing where you use it once and forget about it. I've got a "spatial" photo set as the lockscreen, which looks pretty neat. It will definitely suck up battery life though, I've noticed that I needed to charge more often than before.
I like that the app store now has the search bar at the bottom, and so does the mail app. The camera app is pretty cool with a sleek design, but I always accidentally swipe to portrait mode and it's really annoying. Swiping between the camera options might be a bit too sensitive? My previous complaint of how the clock app's menu icons become yellow when you half-hover over them is now fixed, and the weird orange bits at the top and bottom are also gone. I still think the bubble between the menu buttons on all the apps is very overdone.
Liquid Glass with the latest updates isn't all that bad. Some bits are overdone, yes, my phone gets hotter than normal, yes, battery life is worse, of course, but I think Apple did fix most of the issues I had with iOS 26. There are still plenty of bugs to squash though.