Don't be sad. I'd say you're doing it right! Vertical space is much more limited than horizontal on 21st century monitors, and tabs are wide, not tall. Tree tab UI enables semantic layout (showing you practically unlimited levels of nesting), plus they always give you consistent room to read page titles. Why should the usability of tabs decrease as you open more of them?
This door is already open, as GPS location is easily faked. Android, for example, has an easily-accessed developer setting for manually specifying a device location.
Is it additional links you're looking for? Maybe try asking at a Swatch store if you have one nearby!
A few years ago I bought an older Swatch (maybe released 10 years earlier, so we're not quite talking 90s) on the Internet that showed up in great condition but with the band sized too small and no extra links. The price was great, maybe 1/3 what other examples were going for, so I wanted to avoid returning it if possible.
I took it to a Swatch store, said I'd just received it as a gift, and they pulled out a massive binder loaded with miscellaneous parts. They found the exact links for my band, installed one or two of them for me, polished the watch, apologized for the links not looking completely new… and wouldn't even let me pay for anything. It was kind of shocking, actually.
Nope, just saying I don't use any transparency for my panels. I don't mind it overlapping and hiding part of the window bar because the important stuff is all on the left side of the bar.
I use Plasma with a similar concept as yours, with two bars serving the same purposes.
My vertical icons-only bar goes in the lower-left, has chunkier, more glance-able icons (since pixels on the x-axis are plentiful) and this bar reserves its space from maximized windows. Think part WindowMaker/NextStep and part Unity.
Then a fully-opaque longer horizontal bar in the top-right with tray icons, a clock and a few hardware toggle widgets. Critically, like yours this toolbar stays on top of all windows (to make better use of my y-axis pixels), and my window decorations have left-aligned buttons and titles so max-height windows rarely have their titles cut off by the bar.
Sorry, that was the best link I could find at that moment. Since the word "ubuntu" means something like "humanity towards others," Canonical really leaned into that concept with their tagline "Linux for human beings" in the early days. This involved shipping some controversial wallpaper images and using less risque shots from the same photo shoot on things like the CD-ROM cover.
Downgrading can be dangerous, since app data meant for a newer version of an app can crash an older version that doesn't know what to do with it. This doesn't really feel like enshittification, just saving users from themselves by removing the danger button. It's not like F-Droid is forcing everyone to use the newest version... old versions are still on the website, and they still let you easily grab an old version in-app if you're doing a fresh install.
This may depend on browser but you can double-tap a paragraph to quickly zoom the page so the text is full-width. Of course there's also pinch-zoom or reader mode...
(For Android)