While I’m not a fan of the change (simply unnecessary), I do feel compelled to point out that they followed the design playbook on this one by changing the defaults. That seems to be more the issue for most users than the design change itself.
The idea is that most users won’t deep-dive into their settings every few months to look for new things. Presenting a new default advertises the change but allows the user to revert.
This only works if allowing a fallback option, which was provided this time. For the other workflow-breaking changes based on bad design decisions that I manually build Plasma to revert, this luckily isn’t one of them (the last Dolphin design change is though, and y’all know which one that is…).
When an end user can cleanly roll back a change like this with a native options dialog, it’s a much less painful refinement while feedback is gathered. Really, I hope they do this more often instead of just cutting out the old option entirely.