This is a common complaint, but it’s not clear what the right thing to do is yet.
Changing the sidebar to be more useful is a clear win and I think somebody should do.
The text is useful for people who don’t know what they are looking for. I’d like to hear some more radical designs to solve this problem rather than just changing the expandedness of the current design.
There is a button that collapses the entire page at once in the top right.