Unable to collapse the left side panel in teams anymore

OMG Praise sweet baby Jesus others are annoyed and having the same issue too! I am SO frustrated by this and have spent the past week looking and trying every solution on google, reddit and anywhere else I can read. Nothing works! It seems the update late last week made this function of having the chat activity panel stuck open and it's super frustrating!! I already hate so much about teams but now it taking up more real estate on my screen is so... hulk smash worthy.

Microsoft... can you stop making stupid updates no one asked for and make smart changes people actually want?
Go back to making the chat panel disappear when not hovering over it.

While we're at it, make the notification pop up stop covering the stupid chat box. People have been up in arms for that for years and you instead make the chat activity feed stagnant and unable to go away.

Not a smart use of time or resources.

I am having the same issue and I am not able to complete the steps above because I do not have the option of "Collapse app in the sidebar" in the settings menu and I do not see the diagonal arrows in my version of Teams. This happened in the last few days. Don't know if this makes a difference but I am using Teams through my organization.

Hello, my Teams is presenting with the same issue: the sidebar now takes up half of the Teams window and will not collapse. The above steps did not have any impact. I also don't have the options to collapse tab (no diagonal arrows icon; no "collapse app in the sidebar toggle switch in Appearance settings). I have tried adjusting other settings without success. This seems to be an update error that needs to be fixed on Microsoft's end.

None of the recommended actions worked.

Same issue, this occurred last week after MS teams decided to restart itself, presumably after an update was rolled out.

I'm now unable to collapse the left panel in teams on both my work and home PC's.