a bette way to know when proportional editing is active
When proportional editing is active and the falloff area is too big there is no clue that it is active other than the blue icon on the tob bar.
I'm an educator and newcomers of blender often get stuck when they activate it accidentally and this happens.
I suggest to color the area inside the circle of a light blue or something similar in order to make the circle visible even when is so big that it goes outside the screen, or I suggest to make a colored frame or something like that when the circle is bigger than the screen. In this way it is clar that there is something strange in the viewport and they should know better that the command is active.
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Colored frame = ok, I guess, to inform the mode is active.
Preferred would be that the overlay shows a falloff gradient along the selection influence distance.
I've suggested features to help new users understand Blender, and people here get VERY angry at that idea. Hopefully those same people won't downvote your suggestion to oblivion. I've certainly seen a lot of users get confused when proportional editing is turned on unintentionally.
I posted a few proposals here, and have discussed many. I don't think the general community here has anything against making things easier for new users. Quite the contrary, when done correctly, it's one way to make life easier for everyone.
But, it's precisely hard to make such proposals. E.g. making a power tool more accessible without turning it down to a toy, or solving one issue without making new ones. It's tricky, requires both expertise in different areas and a wide view of the software. Designing software is a job, and here are mostly users that are very passionate about the software they use, some might depend on it for their living, and this can lead to some lively discussion. But let's not reduce this to people being angry ;)
I submitted a suggestion a few months ago (now deleted), suggesting that each member of the Blender team spend two days hanging out on Discord, seeing the kinds of problems new run into repeatedly. New users run into the same problems over and over, and in many cases a bit of UI messaging would be very helpful. I have several decades of experience in UX design, and I know how energizing it can be for developers to see users' pain points, and to feel empowered to help.
I am not overstating when I say that people HATED that idea, with the sentiment being that people on Discord are dumb and deserve to suffer. Someone said something along the lines of they wish they could downvote 3 times. The idea of Blender's development team helping anyone other than experts is abhorrent to some people.
There have been a few proposals to make proportional editing more visual, such as:
I also believe there were devs discussing the matter and trying things out a few years ago, but I can't find such ticket, so maybe I'm wrong.