If I had to guess, your formative experience with technology was via touch screens.

Not at all, actually, I'm in my 30s and I've been geeking out over technology ever since Win95. Even some DOS, but barely, all I knew was prince.exe. I did, however, skip bulletin boards as internet became widely available in my country after their time.

I have Imagus installed so I only need to hover over a link to see the picture.

So do I! But it doesn't work reliably with all the links, unfortunately. But to be fair, you still gotta move your cursor all the way over the link, so is the click really saved at that point?

And btw.

Can’t stand this trend of only using the middle third of the screen.

If I open the old UI on my 1080p screen, the content still only uses about 2/3rd of the screen, it's just that the gap is in the middle, so it's not very efficient either. I will agree that vertically, it fits more information.

I have worked as a UI/UX designer for a couple years and I have always been fighting my boss over making the company software way too cramped. He was always pushing information density. But I would point out to him that every single design guideline shows that UI is better consumed when there's some breathing room, and we would compromise as the result.
Nowadays we have massive screens, we don't need to cramp lots of info into a 640x480 CRT display. But I can see how an old-reddit-UI-inspired new UI can be as info dense and at least look modern. Maybe we should strive for that. Unless of course nostalgia, that thing is unbeatable. Off to replay Prince of Persia (1989).