It didn't though. It took up 1/8th of the screen and it wasn't sticky. If you scroll down it's off the screen. Is it really that big of a deal that you can't see an extra tweet when you are all caught up?
More like a 1/7th of the space previously reserved for the timeline, and considerably worse on older phones with smaller screens (eg iPhone 7). The fact that it disappeared when scrolling down but reappeared instantly when scrolling up made it even more annoying. Tyrannising your scrolling behaviour. The fucking audacity.
Exactly, I hope it will not be occupied by Spaces instead (which I also do not care for).
There was a way to disable it. You could revert to an earlier version of the Twitter app on Android. Version 8.68.0 was the latest version without this feature. As soon as they added it, I uninstalled and then side-loaded the older version and turned off automatic updates. In 2 weeks I'll be able to update again!