Agree, that doesn’t make sense.
The Ribbon has been a central design element of Obsidian for a long time. Removing a frequently used function from the Ribbon needs a good justifcation.
Personally I loathe the Ribbon in Obsidian and the icon bar in Edge. They eat up screen space. They look ugly. They show an arbitrary list of icons that doesn’t make much sense to me. I can’t remember what icon does what, so I always have to hover with the mouse to find what I’m looking for. Ctrl+P is so much faster. I find Obsidian much nicer without the Ribbon.
Personally I love having the name of the current vault always visible in the navigation sidebar, because it provides context for all those navigation tools: navigate files and folders in this vault, search in this vault, bookmarks in this vault, …), tags in this vault, properties in this vault. Personally I lalso ove having Settings close to the vaults name, because they this vault’s settings.
But none of my personal preferences are in conflict with also having Setting, Help and Vault Switcher in the Ribbon. I wouldn’t mind if they are redundant, because this functionality is so elemental.
TLDR: I vote for having Settings, Help and Vault Switcher by default in both locations, the left Sidebar and the Ribbon.