I’ve heard many people saying that the front-end looks old and needs more work, but I’ve never heard someone describe how it could look better. To me, it looks perfectly fine. I wish it had a card layout similar to libreddit, but aside from that, I think it’s nice. If people want a completely different look, then there’s lemmyBB, and there will probably be other front-ends in the future. However, we should hear opinions about which styles people want.
I went exploring some other sites I use to really look at them, and the one that I use for reading a lot of serial stories (Royal Road) also technically has dead space, but it has filled that dead space with a reasonably nice, neutral to slightly dark landscape. So there is something there other than void (or light if you don’t use dark mode), but it’s not something that demands your attention. It makes a pleasant background to have when focusing on text in the center of the screen for a long time.