Timeless is another skin, which was never made default [1]. The skin that hides the languages and doesn't use the full screen space is the new skin (Vector 2002). There was talk about fixing the language menu on Vector 2022, but they deployed it without fixing it. The a/b tests even showed that the introduction of the language-switching button even reduced the amount of clicks on language links, the opposite of what they expected by introducing it [2]. I don't know if those concerns were ignored or if they plan on fixing it later on.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China?useskin=timeless [2] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Reading/Web/Desktop_Improveme...