Initial Impressions
So, it's been 40 years for me...
I was introduced to table top roleplaying in 1984 via D&D (the classic Mentzer red box). I proceeded to DM and play in a variety of BECMI, 1e AD&D, and 2e AD&D adventures for the remainder of the 80's and through the 90's (and also ran and played a lot of other RPG's during that time). I got 3e the day it was released and subsequently ran a long campaign over a couple of calendar years of real world time, which was great fun. After that, I grew tired of the glut of 3e / 3.5e material and the system's instability at high levels, and ended up leaving D&D behind entirely in favor of other RPG's.
Whenever I had the occasional urge for some D&D flavor I would either represent it with a universal engine like the Hero System, or just run D&D 3.75 aka Pathfinder. I skipped 4e entirely, and ignored 5e 2014 until I got bit by nostalgia some time during COVID lockdowns and ended up buying the core rulebooks. I liked what I found, and over the last several years I've run a handful of D&D 5e 2014 campaigns and one shots for my friends and family group. We have generally enjoyed the game, at both high and low levels of play, but with homebrewed material and some house ruling. Given that, we casually followed the 6e / One D&D / no actually 5e 2024 development off and on.
The 5e 2024 Players Handbook seems pretty good!
Regardless of the backdrop of the contemporaneous WotC / Hasbro drama and the branding confusion, I was excited to see what direction the design team would take the rules. In particular I hoped to see a general rebalancing and clean up, rather than major rules changes or unwanted shenanigans.
Having received the 2024 PHB and read it front to back a couple of times, the verdict is "so far so good". In my opinion this is a very clean and refined version of D&D and a real accomplishment as both an artifact of rules text and as a collection of well presented fantasy art.
Art
On the subject of the art, I'm aware of some criticisms of it being "too smiley" or "too woke" and so on. Art is of course subjective and people are of course free to their differing opinions. For my part, though there are some pieces that don't resonate for me personally, I really like quite a lot of it.
I particularly enjoy the illustrations of various spells. I also appreciate the thematically relevant marginalia art sprinkled throughout, relieving the monotony of text but also helping with rapid topical identification when rifling through looking for things. I also appreciate the layout and templating, such as full page spreads opening each class and full column depictions for every subclass. And so on. But YMMV.
Conclusion
Overall I think this is the best version of D&D so far. I do think it is an upgrade over 2014, and I am glad that they went for a refurbishment rather than a radical reinvention.
And yet...
There are a few missteps such as the state of the Ranger, some missed opportunities at rebalancing (particularly among preexisting spells), some questionably balanced newly introduced formulations such as Conjure Minor Elementals, Emanations in general, some naming oddities such as ASI's now being a Feat and Feats no longer being optional but all of the class feature tables still list "Ability Score Improvement" instead of "Feat" at the applicable levels...and similar nitpicky things.
So...I'd call it an "A-".