Can I Stop the Properties Panel Automatically Opening When Creating Gradients?

Is the subject any better now?

What size screen are you using? How large physically, and what is its resolution?

Do you know what the UI is set to in Preferences?

Have you thought about creating a custom workspace?  Arrange the panels you use including Layers and properties, and place them so they work best for your screen size.  Then create a New Workspace.  You might like to also creat a tiny Action that sets an resets your custom workspace and trigger it with one of the Function keys, so you can move things around and tidy up the workspace.

One trick you can do is to minimise the panels you use frequently on a narrow toolbar on the right of the screen up against the layers panel, and any other panel(s) you like.  Clicking on any on of them will open it like the Properties panel below.  Clicking on the chevron (my green highlight) will close it again giving you your screen back.

Properties would open automatically when you start some functions like the new gradient tool, and you can click to close when done.

The defualt function key shortcuts are set up for small screens so you can open and close panels to get them out of the way, but some of them are redundent like F2 - Cut because you can do that with Cmd X.  Others you might rarely use so you could pinch that F key to run actions.  

Another thing you can do is to save custom shortcuts with custom workspaces.   I switch between my custom shortcuts with my most used workspaces, and the default shortcuts wiithg a modified Essentials workspace.  It's a powerful tool and incredibly useful.