I was looking online and I came across a picture of an older version of ardour and I noticed it has a normal looking fader then the ones that are in the current versions of ardour? Was this how It looked at.
That’s a real screenshot, yes.
The “real faders” (whatever that means, since physical controls to manage gain have taken many different forms over the years) are not coming back, and cannot be trivially added back to the program.
The “belt faders” have several distinct ergonomic advantages that unfortunately many users ignore in favor of “visual familiarity”.