Just to echo an opinion on the matter that I shared elsewhere
Short version of reasoning for the change is there are a lot of people out there that expose their Pi-hole web interface to the internet - behind a reverse proxy or otherwise (Just search Shodan!) The less information that is on those dashboards the more secure things are.
Yes it may be handy to glance and see what version you are on, or the number of clients on your network, or the number of domains you've blocked in the past 24 hours, it may be paranoid but I always assume that there are people much cleverer than me that could use information against me (even if, and especially if, I cannot think of how they might)
Take the 24hr graph.. potentially reveals when I am at home and when I am not. This is an extreme hypothetical, of course. Another example could be that there is (hypothetically!) a known exploit with a particular version of Pi-hole - advertising that for the world to see is practically inviting people to attack it.
Security should always trump convenience.
We always publish a blog post to announce new releases. Those blog posts are always cross posted to Reddit, Twitter, and our Discourse forums - there are plenty of ways to see when a new release is available!
As for other points - if your internet is working, so is Pi-hole. If you can get to http://pi.hole
, then Pi-hole is working (if you're not seeing more ads than usual, Pi-hole is still working)
The feedback is appreciated, but we also have to accept that not everyone will always agree with design changes. As is always the way with these things, the people that have nothing negative to say about the change just wont say anything at all - so it can seem like a decision is less popular than it is