[ahartmetz]

As a developer who has worked on similar things, that interface can prevent a lot of trouble of the kind "What if the user edits a setting that updates something in another part of settings, which might also be open at the same time?" - or even the same settings screen opened multiple times. It is rare that such cases come up for users, but they can be very annoying and time-consuming to deal with. Perhaps that was the motivation.

[naasking]

I get it, but instead of putting effort into redesigning the whole interface to avoid this possibility, they could have put that effort into rendering the same UI in immediate mode and problem solved.

I actually think the real motive is that they wanted to move to a more unified mobile and tablet friendly UI code base, which centers more around full screen windows.

[account42]

Making the developer experience easier at the expense of the user experience is the heart of the problem with modern software.