It was a good idea several weeks ago to move the toolbar from the global application header down to the 3D viewport. But it was a bizarre and very bad idea to hide those tool settings by default. Especially to new users familiar with Photoshop and similar software, a toolbar on the left pairs intuitively with a tool settings bar on the top. The N-panel on the right takes up a lot of space and isn’t always the most intuitive place for new users to look, especially when it is closed and nearly invisible. Being on the opposite side from the toolbar (instead of directly above), it also has no spatial relationship with the active tool in the left toolbar.
Furthermore, the 3D viewport is now inconsistently the only viewport to lack a top bar. This can be especially confusing when splitting or joining viewports by dragging the corner if that corner isn’t even a header bar. Plus the subtle effect where the active viewport’s header bar gets highlighted when the mouse hovers over it (required in Blender for the many keyboard shortcuts to work in the appropriate viewport context) is no longer visible when the entire bar is absent, which can thus make it harder to train users that Blender requires keyboard shortcuts to occur with the intended viewport under the mouse. It is also inconsistent with other modes like the sculpt tab, where the header bar is enabled by default (as it absolutely should be, especially when brush properties are at stake) so the default Layout view lacks the header bar in Object Mode and Edit Mode but the Sculpting view has it in Sculpt Mode.
Finally, the settings header bar takes up very little space because the center controls (transformation orientation, pivot center, snap, and proportional editing) already go inside the header bar when it’s active, so only the very left and right sides (infrequently used when editing) get bumped down a few pixels.
Advanced users who really want their ~25 pixels of vertical space on the corners of the screen back can figure out how to hide it if they please, but for the sake of new and average users, please take the sensible default choice of enabling it by default instead of leaving it up to the user to figure out the confusing way of restoring that very useful menu.