"neglected to verify that was actually the case" This seems very true. They decided that "apps" should abandon all of the useful toolbars because they were too

"neglected to verify that was actually the case" This seems very true. They decided that "apps" should abandon all of the useful toolbars because they were too "distracting" which is why gedit ended up being a big white space where you had to poke around in a floating popup menu to work out what you could actually do with it. By the same logic, reading a page of text is horrendously distracting and we should only be given access to 1 line at a time. Insanity, it my view, and a terrible regression on decades of UI development.