It wasn't removed for no reason. It was removed because GNOME doesn't need
it. GNOME uses a "floating" status bar that appears and disappears as needed.
For the record, the exact same thing happened with Firefox. As far as I can
tell, Abrowser 30 doesn't have any option to show a constant status bar.
The GNOME project removes unneeded features. This is a good policy; after
all, you can't leave features in unmaintained (they might break or partially
break eventually, and that would just confuse users), and maintaining
unneeded features is a waste of time. If either of these builds up, it can
become a huge problem; users would be annoyed, or very little development
would get done.
By the way, this is a free/libre software community, not an open source
community. See: https://gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.html
