Thanks for all of your feedback on this change. I'm the developer who led the charge for putting this together, so let me talk through a bit of our rationale.
In the course of making improvements to the Review Queues, I ran across the code for the post menu: lots of lines of code that've hardly been touched for several years, and written in such a way that made it very confusing and difficult to make any changes to it with any semblance of confidence or ease. So, I set about refactoring it to make it easier to update in the future.
In the course of the refactor, we decided to clear up a bit of other technical/design debt while we were in there:
Capitalization - as per our style guide, we use sentence casing on all buttons and links. Spending time here allowed us to bring the menu up to date with the direction in which we're bringing the rest of the site's content.
Formatting - The formatting for post menu was ... interesting. It used invisible spans to organize and separate the menu items, among other things, and it wasn't using Stacks (our design system) at all. We "Stacksified" the menu, which we've been meaning to do for ages but hadn't been able to.
So it seems like most of the feedback here falls into two categories: that we didn't announce the change, and that the menu can fall onto two lines instead of one.
For the first, I'll take responsibility for that. I made the call that this was a small enough change that we could respond to any thoughts that came up, but that it didn't warrant an announcement. It's tough to find the correct line between announcing every single tiny small change that we make (too much!) and only announcing the very biggest of changes (not enough!). It's possible that I erred on the wrong side of that line.
For the second, we spent a lot of time trying to find the best balance between making the menu responsive, usable at small screen sizes, and trying to keep it as close to how it's been as possible. For example, we considered stacking the editor and answerer as a solution as well. An added complication is that the menu shows up totally differently for different users because of permission levels. Ultimately we determined that the solution that you see in front of you hit as many of the right notes as was possible.
I plan to keep an eye on additional feedback rolling in for this change and am happy to revisit further tweaks if it seems like they'll be necessary.
Thanks again for all of your thoughts, and I'm happy to answer any questions y'all have.