What would be the best approach to split the combined notifications & user menu into two?

[Stephen]

This may already be on the way:

Difficult to find logout button in new user menu

One option we’re exploring here is to create a separate menu for notifications, (e.g. under a bell icon rather than the avatar). It’s not at the top of our list yet, but we’ll keep this in mind when we get there as well, in case it doesn’t work out and we want to address this in some other way.