I REALLY dislike the way the geometry nodes menus are now structured in 4.0. It is terrible for beginners who dont even know what is available. Is there a way to get the old menus back where everything isnt buried in sub menus?
Thanks in advance!
3.6 LTS is a great option 
What don’t you like? You say it’s terrible for beginners, but you don’t state the specific behaviours that make it so.
There have been multiple debates about how the menus should behave. There were a couple of camps that wanted very different things, and the current state is the compromise.
Don’t forget you can use the quick menu too, and fill it with the nodes you use the most.
As well as quick menu there is search and typing just the initials of nodes like dpof distribute points on faces or it for image texture.
What submenus? Are you just right click and go to add menu?
Im personally just bind to TAB those Add menu. So its just TAB + write what you want to get.
For learning what is even available, i think its ok to look at documents or just look through submenus.
I’ve been with blender since 3.3, so am not fighting a decade of muscle memory. But I feel the point has merit.
Discoverability is trending down, why the number of choices (nodes) keeps increasing. I love more nodes, but there’s a point that I cannot remember the proper full name of every node - nor always what has been added, which are deprecated but present, and which are gone.
(It also feels like the assignment of submenu for some has changed, or am I just crazy…)
Combine the above with Blender’s infuriating disappearing drop-down menus, and it’s taken me longer now to add a particular node. Using search-add doesn’t help me scan a nicely sorted list of all 18 nodes with the name Euler.
Search works best when you KNOW everything that is present, how they are all categorized, etc. It’s not great when you don’t.
I’m also now constantly putting the application into PLAY mode when not wanted, and that’s awesome.