Merging servers and channels in the sidebar was perfectly fine. It’s a single action for the singular task of “going somewhere else”. Everything is one screen. Swipe right, there it is.
The new bottom bar is a clear downgrade. The mechanics of folders are annoying enough to make me want to stop using folders entirely; there’s no way to just leave them expanded, so it’s always two taps to get to a server in a folder. If you have folders of servers grouped by context, you can no longer effectively switch contexts.
The channel view is bloated by default, but fortunately there’s an option settings to make it “compact”, which is similar to the old UI in terms of information density.