Take

Reflections:

• Unusually light on features.
• There are crash-on-use incompatibilities in the release notes, but so far this is notably solid for a first beta, maybe even iOS 12-level. Probably related to the previous point.
• Moving most stuff I use some of the time to a second home screen and turning off the third-to-nth home screens knowing the apps are still all in the App Library is a very good feeling of freedom.
• The only widget I use so far is the weather widget, which when set to Current Location occasionally teleports back to Cupertino (homesick?) following which it refuses to reflect the actual location unless you change to another location and back. This sounds like a consequence of the way widgets are pre-baked, UI-wise.
• Update: some widget-related manipulation and the automatic moving-aside thereof of apps and folders ended up straight up removing two folders and two apps, which had to be re-added from the App Library. (One could think that they would have slipped onto one of the app pages/home screens since hidden, but that doesn't seem to be the case.) These folders had been present in their current configuration for several years, iOS versions and indeed devices.
• Finding an app in the App Library is easy enough, but adding it back to the home screen is inconsistent. As far as I can tell, you have to find it within one of the folder-like blobs in the App Library (as one of the featured three or from showing from the fourth item) and drag it from there. You can pull up the list/search results from App Library and drag the icon, but not the full row. And if you pull up the regular home screen/global search, you can't drag neither the icon nor the row. In none of these four cases does long pressing bring up a context menu.
• Emoji search is a winner, although the always-there-search field adds some height, which is robbed from the app itself.