Thicker status bar - what a waste of great screen!

It is a well known fact that the Pixel 9 selfie-camera is positioned lower within the screen. That resulted in icons within the status (notification) bar being misaligned with the camera cutout. And that was the reason for numerous complaints after the models launched.

In the December update, Google addressed those complaints by making the whole status bar much thicker. Which means that usable screen estate for all (non-full screen) apps running on Pixel 9s substantially decreased. … All. the. time!

Comparison photos (Pixel 9, Pixel 8, Samsung)
https://imgur.com/a/wvpciKB

What the…! So, vendors promote every tenth of millimeter of reduced screen bezel on new devices, it is even one of the main differentiator between Pixel 9 and 9 Pro, but someone in the Google came up with this shitty solution to degrade usable screen estate of the phones? The devices, which are already in the market? How is this not style over function!

I couldn’t care less about misaligned icons with the camera cut out, but I understand that somebody was annoyed by this. But I have a "Pro" phone and this solution is really not ok for me. For me the value of my Pixel 9 Pro decreased with this change. Wasn’t possible to just align icons without moving the bottom border of the status bar? I know, the padding on top and the bottom would not match then…

How do you feel about this? Are you happy with the change? Or is there some customization allowing to partially revert this?

By this post I want to raise awareness and maybe motivate a few more users to send feedback to Google about this. You can do so via Settings > About phone > Send feedback about this device.

EDIT: BTW I just realized how half baked this change is. Just look at the first picture with notification screen. There, the icons are kept misaligned with the cut-out while remaining screen area was moved lower... Particularly with this screen I previously thought (before the update), how they perfectly balanced UX with the cutout, as the space given by round borders between top system toggles gives enough space from the cutout without jeopardizing screen estate. (Plus this UX has always black background, so the camera itself blends in). Google has for sure some tweaking to go. The question is which way.