Hello Dumisani ,
I would like to remind you of the questions in this thread, although I understand that there may be some delays in getting responses due to the issues with Covid-19.
I have not looked into the new portal and I don't have an opinion about it, but I hope that affiliates will find it to be an improvement.
I have one point that I would like to make. Protection of a page is an administrative action, and I do not believe that any WMF staff should make content administrative actions on Meta unless under exceptional circumstances such as a legal mandate. If WMF wants a page on Meta to be protected, then WMF should make a request to a community administrator for page protection, which the administrator may independently decide whether to grant. If WMF wants more control over content, then a more appropriate venue for affiliate reports would be one of the WMF wikis instead of a (mostly) community wiki. I feel that it is important that WMF staff not encroach on the jurisdiction of the community such as by making administrative actions, however small, that can and should be done instead by community administrators.
Thanks,