I’ve been on the test for this design since October 4, 2019, so I’ve actually gotten used to it! But it’s probably a good thing for them to backtrack. I wonder what went wrong in their clearly lengthy experiment about how this would perform.
The issue was cultural. The articles saying “okay this is too far on making Ads hard to see” and the super hilariously ironic fact that they launched this on the exact day that Basecamp went in front of congress to explain how Google is abusing running ads on trademarks, where this design make it much much worse.