It should be said that, as with any design, there are tradeoffs here.
There are lots of advantages to this approach (see the design page),
but there are one or two actions that might require an extra click
with the new design.
One click doesn't sound too bad, but if it means launching a gnome-control-center
app that takes 3+ seconds to pop-up, it might become... frustrating.
For the VPN, can we get a toggle for the most recently used right there, and maybe
click on the VPN label to launch the tool when that isn't sufficient?