I genuinely have nothing nice to say about the new layout.
Aesthetically it's soulless and lacks character as most "modern" designs do. It's just bad. Not much else to say on that because it's a matter of opinion.
Functionally it's just as bad.
It wastes so much screen space on absolutely nothing where it could be showing me more mods as it did before. The game title and file statistics above the Trending Mods section is redundant. Seriously, who is that for? It is just wasting space that could be used by the rest of the trending mods.
I know Nexus' hard-on for Collections so I won't even waste time on that.
The new files section is also burdened by the serious waste of space around the tiles as well as their overall size. Where I could comfortably view ten mods and their descriptions before, now I can reasonably see only four in their entirety. Zooming the page out does not help at all. I'm still seeing fewer mods than I did before at an even smaller size. It's very strange to call this change in favor of visibility and browsability. I hilariously feel gaslit to have read that testers "discover[ed] more new mods than they previously would have." In what reality does showing someone less let them see more?
All that said, I'm more frustrated that Nexus continues this trend of making sweeping changes, opening feedback to those changes, then telling those who give reasonable negative feedback to get used to it or kick rocks. I've seen it happen time and time again and fully expect it to keep happening.