I can understand you are designing this to be "visual" for people that prefer that - but why force that view on everyone? Its laughable that the head of design says, "If you're solely focused on mods, it’s easy to forget that users browse other types of content too" - you guys remember your name, right? NexusMods. That is why the majority of us visited the website first.
Keep the design if that is what you want - but please give us functionality to make the Collections and Trending Mods tiles smaller. I don't want to have to scroll just to see the latest updates. Or a hyper-link so we can skip past them to the full mod links.
Heck, if not I hope there is some alternative browser, or some extension for browsers to hide what now feels like clutter.
Actually, if there is no ability to customise the tile size, what it will likely drive is that I automatically go to the game, '/mods' pages and completely avoid the main mod link. So skip over needing to see the collection/trending clutter. Which is likely the opposite from what you are wanting to do.