I don't think you're right about that. I've never seen any IHub change anger people as much as this one did. That happened because it wasn't just cosmetic; it affected functionality in a very real way.
Mobile users were furious; you'd no doubt seen images of the gibberish they were getting on their screens. And people who put lots of charts in posts were furious, because the charts were either chopped up or too small to read.
Those are two very large groups at IHub. If you're running the show, you don't want to offend them.
Change for the sake of change is not necessarily a good thing. In this case, it most certainly was not. You don't have to be a slavish imitator of other sites that don't even serve the same purpose as yours; yes, you can simply ignore the clumsy, junky ISTCF. Really!
And you can find another way to slake London's insatiable lust for more ads than can realistically fit on a page.