This doesn't make anything easier to use, the old interface was more like other chat apps. On top of it being large-ish changes in the "old" client, when the new one that's supposed to replace it and be so much better still doesn't do everything (and they've already pissed of a good chunk of users by hyping that before it was ready, so they stuck with the old client for now waiting, just for that to get messed up too).

I'd agree with that, but based on this post I don't see that this is a huge step forward. From my perspective the big UI issues are not with this kind of stuff. Some of the bigger problems are intertwined with the server and protocol.

Search, for instance, is a major weak spot; it sometimes gets its index messed up and resetting it a bunch of times still doesn't work. Even when it does work, it fails to find what I'm looking for. This is partly because because the protocol doesn't actually define any particular search behavior, so there's no way to even know what the search is doing (i.e., whether it's searching for literal text, some kind of "smart" search, or what).

Another obvious UI gap is moderation tools, which are woefully inadequate to actually handle the kind of spam that sometimes floods in. Some of this also has to do with things that probably should be fixed on the protocol or server level (e.g., some kind of flood detection).

For people looking to Element as a Discord replacement, what would help are changes that make things work more like Discord in various ways (e.g., joining a space auto-joins you to various rooms), but again these require protocol-level support.

Overall I'm actually pretty satisfied with the Element desktop UI, and the main issues I've had with it (apart from the above) are in the onboarding/verification stuff, which is an area where things have noticeably improved over the past year or two. I wouldn't say that the Element desktop UI is a major weak point for Matrix. There are much bigger problems that need to be tackled, and my prediction is that as long as they remain untackled, small-scale UI changes like the ones mentioned in the post aren't going to move the needle.