Let me suggest another hypothesis: both designs are equivalent^ and you just hated the feeling of unfamiliarity twice. That feeling passes with time like everything does.

Users don’t like change, that’s the correct part. New is better - that part may be incorrect by exactly the same argument. Users don’t like change-back too, and you are a user.

Btw, the first thing I’ve added to stylebot on SO was a bigger width for the content column, so that most of regular code snippets wouldn’t have an h-scroll.

Btw2, I almost screwed up my comment twice because someone decided to redesign the text selection popup menu on latest ios 16.x. They now AI/ML/whatever cut-copy-paste button positions, so my muscle memory hits the wrong one constantly. Thankfully, HN rules don’t allow me to explain what I think of this “new design”.

With years I understood one thing: you won’t be heard and the only reasonable action to take is to ignore. I believe 90% of users do just that - say f it and ignore, because the alternative is to shout into the void.

^ ignoring new functionality (if any) which could have been added without redesigning.