It seems it's a trend to make everything require more clicks for 'cleanliness'. In the end, it just makes everything frustrating. You end up having to add search to make anything usable. Windows 10 and Android settings are both great examples of this.
Eventually the problem did go away because of larger monitors in a higher resolution. But well, nobody would ever think about going back into those ugly interfaces!
Oh, and count me as another previous Namecheap customer that isn't anymore mostly because of their interface. "Mostly" because I had one domain that needed DNSSEC when they didn't support it, and that's what started my migration, but what made me move everything was the interface.
Some of us would like to get our toolbars back.
The old ugly interfaces were perfectly good for simple software. We could use something better on the more complex kinds of software, but what he have today isn't.
The #1 rule I used to follow is I am on this control what can I do here and is it clear. The #2 rule is What is my next step from step #1 and is it easy to find where I currently am.
Break either of those and the GUI will be confusing. Disappearing controls makes you think something is wrong. I would typically go with disabled and a clear indicator of the something else needing to be filled out. If that was not achievable a tooltip on the disabled control to tell the user what to do.
The way to achieve it is to pretend you are on 2 hours of sleep and not very computer savvy.
Now you can go too far and make the whole thing a busy mess and then it is unclear where to even begin. A good rule of thumb with that is left to right top to bottom, keep scrolling to a minimum. Most people get that. One I was using just yesterday was jumping around in the page and the 'finish' control was in the top left and scrolled off the page.
Namecheap's old UI was perfect, info dense, you could do everything. Now they try and hide everything useful from me in the name of looking like every other hipster inspired UI. It's not bad enough I've bothered moving off of them but I've stopped using Namecheap for new names simply because of how much I hate their new UI.
All they had to do was literally nothing and I'd still be a happy customer.