Our community is in a similar boat; we got the update that opted us in to this change, and immediately got a feedback topic asking for us to opt out. We did. I’ll be sad to lose the opt-out, as will others in our community.
I still find the new new quite confusing — it intermingles an individual’s tracked state (watched topics with unread posts) and global state (new topics by topic creation date), but sorts by the last post (well, technically the “activity” timestamp, but that’s typically the timestamp of a reply, not the topic itself. I think that’s why it’s confusing for folks to understand when something drops off new).
I don’t understand how this is meaningfully different from what was tried (and reverted following feedback!) three years ago.