That's quite a bold statement from an armchair UX designer. They obviously have reasoning and supporting data, maybe you're in the minority of users who've found that useful?

Thanks for the feedback! In this iteration, we think recovering more space helps users focus on content, and allows them to see more content at once. Definitely we recognize the tradeoff of additional clicks and discoverability as a result.

We are definitely focused on usability, and navigation in general. We don't claim to know all the right answers all the time. So we are iterating with each release, and working hard doing user research as well to inform our decisions. You can see some of our recent work regarding nav here: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/ux-research/issues/3. Thanks.

I'd argue that extra screen real estate for the content that matters often lends itself toward better UX, but any specific suggestions for improvements would be appreciated. :)