Same. I had to go into incognito mode and specifically navigate to the page to see what the fuss was about. I don't think I'd ever seen the SO homepage before that.
If so, I really don't get the problem. Has anyone without a SO account ever gone to their home page to try to look up an issue? Surely it's overwhelmingly more common to just search for an issue directly in a search engine and check the SO links in the results if they turn out to be relevant.
And right now, visiting https://stackoverflow.com/ in a private browsing window, I still see a search bar right at the top. I really have no idea what anyone could have a problem with here.