something did seem different, and better-ish maybe, except for the 'main bar' that can collapse/expand from the left -- the one with 'Compose / Inbox / Starred / Snooze' -- was a bit too wide -- has all this dead space off to the right of the labels, so my email subjects were harshly abbreviated.

I tried to slide the nav bar back to the left to narrow it, but no bueno, so i look for and find this extension called Gmail Side Bar Resize or something like that -- it works, but it also seems to steal my email address and sign me up for a newletter and put some widgets in my gmail UI and try to force me to sign up for some account, and generally slows gmail down on top of all that -- so i uninstalled that and reported abuse -- if it wasn't abuse, it sure as hell felt like it.

so i guess, 'yes', i glot slammed over today. it seems i might have to learn to live with a collapsed navbar, as the div that i want to narrow doesn't seem to have a predictable ID, dev would be too painful for me, etc.

I made a thing to fix it: https://github.com/nuchi/gmail-inbox-high-contrast-restorati... (it's a uBlock Origin filter list)

huh, didn't seem that it changed for me

Same; I'm not seeing any difference either.