People are too hung up on the look of the interface when they talk about skeuomorphic design.
It used to be that on iOS the bottom tabs would get indented when they were selected. That Z-axis intent, that apps would have even when they weren’t very skeuomorphic, that I hope it returns.
Having a physical material-ness like this is the founding principle of Google Material UI.
I kind of get that sense too. Sure, a "button" may be "skeuomorphic", but it's also a perfectly sensible graphical indication of a place that can be clicked, and only a small minority of "buttons" in the real world ever looked like a UI button. The UIs as a whole shouldn't be classified as "skeuomorphic". That generation of interfaces did a lot of other things that were only vaguely related to the real world... we have tabs, but tabs don't act like this. Looking up at my tab bar right now, they aren't even styled as "tabs", and nobody cares because that was never the core part of the appeal. Non-flat design had IMHO a much richer design language than flat design ever developed. Missing that design language and being forced into baby-speak for so much UI, when GUIs are already baby-speak themselves in so many ways (yes, the old UNIX hacker still sees the world this way) is very frustrating.
Even just a couple of layer's worth of visual depth, that ".5D", is so very useful.