Then say what you mean and complain about small icons. Claiming that one set of visuals is compatible with gestures while another one is not sounds like looking for excuses to justify your personal aesthetic preferences and trying to give them an "objective" status.

I have to take my glasses off to see anything on my Jolla. Typing an email or a text message is a torture. The letters are so tiny it is impossible to do it on the move. The status bar icons and fonts are much, much bigger than that. Even I can actually read them.

That again sounds like trying to sell your own preferences. "It's ugly" sounds so much more objective than "I don't like it", right?
What noise? You do not get anything extra that you would not have had before. The only difference is that, instead of the icons being scattered all over the screen, they are now in one line. If anything, it looks less cluttered to me than before, not more.

But why are we discussing the damn status bar anyway? Is that really the most important thing in the universe? How about things that really matter, like copy&paste or a miriad of other issues reported on TJC and ignored for two years?