I actually found cinnamin to be more resource intensive than Gnome on most computers.

I don’t understand why the control panel UI wasn’t modernized instead? Would that really be unfeasible? I think it still might have been less work than to maintain 2 coexistent “settings/control panel” apps and migrate from one to another. Sometimes you have to throw out the old code base and start from scratch. But if you do so shouldn’t you rather distrubute the result when your finished and not in a half-baked compromise-like state?

You won’t get video recommendations on your home feed (and maybe also other parts of youtube) if you have watch history disabled in your google account settings (you request google not to save your watch history).