In addition, will resetting Gnome back it to its defaults cause any issues with the current setup of my Creative 15 laptop, based on its factory defaults when I first received it a couple weeks ago?

Good morning,
In the Extensions App you can change Dash to Panel option switch to change the appearance of the bar.
Changing the option shouldn't affect any issues.
Kind regards,

That turning off the Dash to Panel from the extensions app does not doing anything other than move the toolbar from the bottom to the top of the screen on my laptop and I lose all the apps that were pinned to it.  Turning it back on, does bring all those pinned apps back.

What I'm talking about is being able to switch the look and feel back to the Gnome defaults, as it would look if I had installed a brand new instance of Ubuntu 24.04 on my laptop.  I've read that I can do that using the dconf command from the terminal, but I'm not sure if that would mess up anything already configured and installed from when my laptop was shipped to me.  Also, I'd like to know if there would be a way to restore my desktop back to the way it was when it was shipped to me if I decide to go back to that interface.

Please advise.

I was able to figure out what was going on.  I was expecting my apps to show in a toolbar on the left side of the screen.  But, when I click on the icon on upper left of the toolbar at the top of the screen, it showed my activities along with a toolbar at the bottom with all my pinned apps.  That looks pretty decent, so I will go with that.

Thank you for your help.

FYI, I went a step further and enabled the Ubuntu Dock from the Extensions app and made sure the pinned app icons were displayed on the left.  Now, my desktop is back to the Gnome default that is expected if I had installed a brand-new instance of Ubuntu 24.04, which is what I was looking for.  That was really easy to do.  Now, if I want to go back to the original look-and-feel, I just disable the Ubuntu Dock extension and enable the Dash to Dock extension.