There is a keyboard shortcut. It’s CTRL+ALT+Z for me. Unless you mean something else?
As for the “reveal on hover”, iirc there was a dismissable message that said it is coming soon.
If I can share my opinion, they are more than big enough if you toggle the checkbox “optimize for touch screen”. I would have to try Arc or Zen again to understand what you mean.
The only complaint I have is that I need to hover (or expand) to see the title. It becomes annoying when I’m reading documentation and I end up with multiple tabs with the same icon.
EDIT: I can’t seem to find the “optimize for touch screen” checkbox anymore, but I’m sure there is something like that somewhere because I enabled it on one of my devices which has a touch screen.
EDIT 2: the “optimize for touch screen” option can be seen by right clicking the toolbar and choosing “Customize toolbar”. Changing the density to “Touch” (on the bottom) makes these icons bigger.
Personally, I’ve been sharing this folder across different installations for years, even between different operating systems. I’ve never had any major issues so far.
The only minor annoyance is that whenever I switch between Windows and Linux I have to restart the browser once, otherwise extensions do not load on the first run.
So yeah, I would say diy-syncing this profile folder is feasible and very reliable. Same thing is true for Thunderbird, but I’ve been doing it for less time. And I would assume the same thing is also true for Chromium-based browsers because I do it with Signal which is Electron-based.