I use the Tournaments mode, so I play the Tour (grid with beads) and Sim (w/o beads) difficulty settings somewhat often and have a good amount of experience using greens with and without beads. I think you happen to be at the exact putting skill level where the grid size that was there before is now set to be at, with the size changing based on Putting skill level. I had it at 5 and it changed, feel free to test changing your putting down to that, or 0 (I tested that too and they were gigantic) and you'll notice a clear difference. The size shouldn't change between beads and no beads settings, just whether there are beads there or not.
To be fair, the changes to shot dispersion size are hard to notice if you only play Sim difficulty where you can't zoom in most of the time and see the dispersion size for yourself. I checked the shot dispersion of the types changed before and after the patch and noticed clear differences. They probably won't make a huge difference in gameplay (except the blast, they shrunk its dispersion so much), but I think they will have an impact at the competitive level which I appreciate because this game has been labeled as casual-focused so much yet they're making balancing changes with compeitive players in mind.
The change to the Tour arc is a nice one I didn't mention, I think they saw the crazy high scores in the eSports tournaments and wanted to make Tour mode harder as a result. It does make the gap between Pro and Tour difficulty even larger than it already was, but that's another discussion. Anyway I can see how it'd feel like not much was changed, I think the changes were mainly made for higher levels of play, but they will change how some people play the game. Ultimately it's hard to make changes in patches that will affect everyone.
I think I've mentioned this before, but at this point I don't want new content, I want the game to be fixed. I have plenty of clothing items to switch between and the game has 35 courses which feels at least enough to me. I took a 2 week break from the game recently, partially cause some of the bugs and glitches did wear down my enjoyment of the game.
Problem is we're 2 patches in to this "fixes over content" era and while some nice changes have been made (AI, balancing, etc.) it feels like only a dent has been made in fixing the game. Lie %s still mostly suck, sidehill lies still barely do anything, the cup physics aren't fixed, the commentary still references the wrong player/team in career mode/match play all the time, are some challenges still not giving stars?, the career mode AI is still overly simplistic and prone to play stupid shots (hitting a wood straight into the water at Augusta's 15th for example), the list goes on. And the list of changes for this patch felt smaller than other patches?
I still don't envy this dev team trying to fix the game, like said before this game clearly came out way early, and either their bug testing process is woefully inadequate or the code they've been forced to use has issues since almost every patch comes with additional bugs. It still just sucks though.
Don't count out new content coming next year around the majors though, the devs didn't say anything when they played the Ryder Cup with Apex but that's probably because nothing was final. That could still go either way imo.