I myself am a graphic and web designer, and I'm so tired of this recent (last decade at most) trend of adding so much unnecessary padding between everything. So many designers want to be trendy and modern without thinking about efficiency. Adding a bunch of blank space only makes the user have to look over a larger area to get the same amount of information.
Take the front page for example; every mod, image, post, etc in a row has a gap of 24px. The old layout had a gap of 10px. With only 1px larger text, the new layout does nothing for readability at the cost of 20% fewer items per row. They're also taller with much more vertical padding, so it takes a lot more scrolling for the same amount of information as the old layout. Only being able to see 4 mods on screen at once instead of 10 is a massive downgrade with zero benefit.
This all leads back to the root of the problem: something many designers fail to recognize is a layperson's inability to explain what they dislike in design terms. They see people complain about colors or fonts and brush off their complaints, when really they're indicators of larger issues. Changes like these should be done in small tweaks over time, never in large, all-encompassing updates like this.