Oh, man... What I wouldn't give to have Pages (and other apps) appear like they did in OS X Lion. This is just depressing.

While I feel so too, I do actually think that objectively Catalina is a UX-side step up. Current displays have 16:9 or even 3:2. Putting less things in the top bar and more stuff in the sidebar, especially in something like Pages where your content does not even fill half of your display horizontally, I think it makes sense.

From the first version of iWork, the inspector panel had the same basic purpose and layout as the sidebar. (Screenshot: http://www.macosxtips.co.uk/index_files/120609-inspector-win... ).

The formatting bar was an (IMO unnecessary) option added in iWork 08.

With iWork 2016, they took the existing inspector panel setup and docked it into each window.