[zo1]

I literally have the opposite experience as a dev. The new interface is horrible, and it's not just the layout. They subtly somehow changed the borders and their color. I now officially can't delineate and know which part of the UI is for what.

I had to fiddle with color schemes, add-ons for updated icon colors, etc. It's a mess.

And even if it's about reducing cognitive overload. The old interface had plenty of "features" and "configuration" to reduce the cognitive load as much as you wanted with both presentation mode and the ability to change the UI however you wanted.

My cynical take is that we just had two giant camps promoting this. One was the designers that wanted to have something to do. And the other camp was the VSCode pushers that just couldn't stand that a glorified (and order of magnitude inferior) text-editor is maintaining user-counts.