Bridge newest update is awfull

First off, once you get what you "almost" want, save it as a new Workspace. This way, if anything goes wrong, you can always quickly return to what you "almost" want. (See image below for how to create a new workspace)

Second. Rather than minimize that left panel, why not remove it? Go to the three short horizontal lines in the upper right corner of any Panel (also knowns as the hamburger menu) and select "Close Panel." You have not removed it from Bridge; you've just removed it from your Workspace. After you have made your layout more the way you want, click on the hamburger menu for your Workspace and select  "Save changes to this Workspace."

You can make as many Workspaces as you want (at least, I think you can, I've never made more than half a dozen). But the next thing is to control how you see them.

Go to the far right side of the Workspace selector, and you'll see two chevrons pointing to the right. Click on them and select the bottom option: Edit.

From there, you'll be able to reorder the Workspaces to what is best for you.

As far as your crashing when selecting things from the path bar, that's not a bug or anything normal. I suggest you start to do some basic maintenance on Bridge and/or your Mac. At first, I'd suggest you rebuild your Bridge's preferences and maybe also purge your folder's Cache. Those are basic things, so let's start there.

Quit Bridge (if running). Just before clicking on Bridge in the Dock or double-clicking the application for the Mac, press Command-Option-Shift. For PCs, press Control-Alt-Shift. Then open Bridge BUT KEEP your fingers on those keys until you see a window pop up. From the window, choose “Reset Preferences," "Entire Thumbnail Cache,” and/or "Reset Standard Workspaces.” In your case, choose "Reset Preferences."