[wizzledonker]

I’ve seen skeuomorphic designs done with vector art, surely this can’t be the only/real reason.

[andrekandre]

like most things it was probably a combination of things:

marketing (big new design), design trend catch-up (metro, android), and all those other technical reasons (memory, textures, vector graphics, enables easy dark-mode) etc etc

just my guess, but making a dark mode (more easily) possible must have been a large factor too