Time is a flat circle. I remember when honeycomb launched with a bottom navbar, only for Google to delete it later in favor of a (terrible) phone like gui
A lot of early Android designs make no sense for the monstrously large screens phones have gained over the years. Windows Phone 8 had always-on but it took many years for Android phones with decent OLEDs to come out; just because a feature disappeared for a while doesn't mean it wasn't a questionable choice for most devices at the time.
Honeycomb was a tablet only ui. Google ditched the more effective ux in a fit of unification, that I believe is significantly responsible for killing Android tablets