In #66836, the "Starter Content" Modal was replaced with Zoomed-out mode. This Issue here is meant to track some of the follow up tasks:

Loading Performance

Loading the full editor feels slower and more "janky" with this new behavior. See attached video. There are sooooo many cumulative layout shifts happening here and the time to interactive / useful content loaded is really sub optimal.

Yes part of this is coming from the fact that currently for pages the template is shown by default and loading template parts is not a great experience either. But this is even more pronounced in the zoomed out mode at the beginning because first users get to see an "error" state saying no patterns available. And then it loads for quite a while.

Wrong initial pattern category selected by default

As it stands right now the "All" category is selected rather than the "Starter content" one.

The default placeholder for adding content is not shown in zoomed out mode

Another recent change that was applied to the Zoomed out mode is that placeholders of blocks such as the Paragraph are no longer shown in zommed out mode. This makes it so a user cannot start writing content without starting from a pattern first.

It's hard to exist the Zoomed out mode

This is especially true for someone that isn't familiar with the software. But even for me who spends multiple hours every single day using WordPress I am really disoriented by the Zoomed Out mode experience. Getting interrupted by this mode and first having to figure out how to get out of it / how to close the inserter is really slowing down the user experience.