I see that you’ve already opened a ticket about this in Core Trac: https://core.trac.ww.wp.xz.cn/ticket/63298
I would recommend raising this question with the Gutenberg team, who are responsible for this component: https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/issues
Welp, they already closed this persons ticket… logged in to also voice my annoyance with this ‘feature’.
This is infuriating and needs to be toggleable as OP requested in the ticket.
@traxus: then I would recommend the same as jorbin wrote in the ticket:
If you would like to provide feedback, you are welcome to comment on closed issues
This way, your voice can also be heard by the developers who take care of this component.
I can’t edit my initial post but wanted to clarify the issue and one thing I stated that is incorrect:
I said the content is all squished into the bottom, which is true by default, but the window can be expanded manually by grabbing and dragging the divider up and down.
However even though this area can be expanded to be more “workable” it would still be better for some sites if it was reverted to one big scrollable frame with content stacked on meta, rather than two frames.
I ended off here being affected (and annoyed) by this design decision. It is surprising that “commenting on a closed issue” is a recommended thing to to – feels like beating a dead horse. So I will add a suggestion there to make this change hackable with a filter hook for people who are not willing to adopt it, or if there are plugins involved that create their metaboxes in an incompatible way.
Quite lot of css hacks can already be found in the wild, and creating an official one might do the trick.
Since last week, the open issue at the Gutenberg team has evolved into this: https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/issues/69923
