Honestly the hieroglyphic buttons are a deal breaker for me. It's just a cognitive load I can't overcome without frustration. The vertical labels were just perfect and Jetbrains actively ignores feedback on that. On a second place, not having bottom toolbars anymore is such a downgrade! I would use it to have a convenient console at hand constantly. I did use the Git buttons constantly, and now it's either hard or impossible to customize some buttons, plus they'll be hieroglyphical. And at the end, I just don't like how there's less information like where my file is located (as in, "which index.js was I looking at?"), visual separators marking button borders and tab borders are now gone, and so on.
Now, there's the classic plugin but it's got an expiration date. I also could get used to all of this, and I did, I migrated to VSCode. It has a surprising (yet hilariously complex) amount of theming options and I got the contrast to previous JB defaults. Because Jetbrains' communication has been just awful throughout this change these past couple of years, I just don't trust them anymore to not destroy my workflow on a whim, it's a portent of enshittification.
The bottom toolbar... is something I didn't consider actually. Also agree with you on that. That removed a whole layout option. (Split bottom left/right, OR open a wide bottom pane. Now all panes need to be splits.)
I despise the trend of removing text labels for icons. It's bad design, everyone knows it's bad design, Windows 11 is full of this mistake, but one company did it and I guess now everyone has to do it.
Now, there's the classic plugin but it's got an expiration date. I also could get used to all of this, and I did, I migrated to VSCode. It has a surprising (yet hilariously complex) amount of theming options and I got the contrast to previous JB defaults. Because Jetbrains' communication has been just awful throughout this change these past couple of years, I just don't trust them anymore to not destroy my workflow on a whim, it's a portent of enshittification.