Drawing 2 overlapping shapes or paths (or shapes expanded from paths) could once be reliably split/trimmed/etc cleanly using Pathfinder tools.

Currently, doing so autogenerates dozens of unnecessary bezier points. This can be cleaned up using the smooth tool, but becomes a tedious process, especially given that the same cleaned shape will behave the same way if Pathfinder is used again.

This is a critical part of my workflow that's become substantially disrupted by whatever change was made under the hood in the past 6 mos - year.

My hope is that with the change to other drawing tools, this is a preference I'm simply not seeing that can be changed.

AI 24.2.3 on Mac OS 10.14.6 and 24.2.1 on 10.15.6