On a more focused level, the removal of transparency is something that has bothered me as a whole and I recently looked into why. It's basically what you said: By showing all or nothing, they've simplified the computation work to a single 1-bit true/false per pixel with dithering. It's as simple as that, and they hope to vaseline smear anti-aliasing to look transparent. And it looks like crap of course, especially against any older game with real transparency, but since it's included in the two big engines all devs use, that's what we get.
But what gets me about this is they've simplified a 8-bit layer into a 1-bit layer. I get it, that's a huge work saver. But bumping that to just 2-bit (100%, 66%, 33%, 0%) is a ridiculously huge improvement for marginal overall work. We know historically from color bits how vast the improvements are from each of the first few. I wish literally anyone would experiment and realize it themselves, but the problem stems from devs using cookie-cutter engines without the skills (or time, labor) to improve on what comes in the box.