> I imagine this will push some new users away

I suspect it will gain them more users than it will lose

Most other tools doing this are heavy, buggy, and built on electron

Yeah, we are getting to the point where you having a 4K monitor for your editor becomes a requirement rather than a "nice to have". Until now you have the agent, the editor and files/git/whatever, if you add a fourth panel to that, it becomes pretty cramped at lower resolutions. Fortunately, I do have a 4K monitor, but until now I used to have the editor on one half of it and another window (a browser most of the time) on the other half. So having to use the editor full screen is still slightly annoying.

Of course, that's only the default layout. I'm not familiar enough with Zed, but there's probably a way to change it? In JetBrains IDEs, you can configure panels to sit at the top left/bottom left/left bottom/right bottom/bottom right/top right side and show/hide them with one click (if only one panel on the respective side is shown, it will take up the full space). So you could have files at the top left and the agent panel at the bottom left. And the code editor is of course still the "centerpiece" in the middle.

Luckily it's very easy to change, although a bit unintuitive for new users. You right-click the small icon for each type of panel in the bottom bar, and select where you want it to be docked. Left click toggles the panel into view.

It will also pull more users in. I don't want to be looking at code. I want more of a codex style app where it's easy to shove all my projects in one place and context switch endlessly.

This was also my first impression. But it seems to me the changes are mostly about swapping what panels dock where (left or right) and maybe some additions/tweaks around the AI panels. On macOS these are still the same:

    ⌘B : toggle the left dock
    ⌘R : toggle the right dock

If you opt-in to the new layout, the panels that used to sit in the left dock are now in the right dock. I will give it a try even for classic coding. One can change what panels get docked where from the settings window.