No, we’re not planning on reintroducing the “Add cell menu” as it was called. Many users found it disruptive and distracting when creating new cells. We’ll likely bring back equivalent code snippets that are available via code autocomplete, like these (although I find these snippets to be a little bit too opaque and want to find a way to see a little bit more of the code before it’s inserted):
Another technique is to have a notebook that includes code samples, and then copy-paste cells from the notebook (which also works between old and new Observable; select the cell with the checkmark in the notebook toolbar or by hitting Esc, then Mod-C to copy), or fork the notebook.
But yes, we do believe that canned snippets are extremely limited compared to what AI can do, and so are putting more effort into AI. The AI tends to do much better because it is more open-ended and can adapt to the context of the notebook. And we like to remove underused and underpowered features so that we can reduce the surface area of what we need to support and what users need to learn, though naturally we cannot satisfy the needs of everyone.
I don’t know if the menu will be exactly as it was before but absolutely, yes, we plan on supporting embeds, likely both iframe embeds and JavaScript imports (“runtime embeds”). The latter will likely be a paid feature, though you can always freely download your notebooks and self-host them (or develop them locally in the first place), and in many cases self-hosting is a good idea for performance and autonomy anyway.