When viewing the home directory with Nautilus, files and directories starting with '.' are now visible.
Some examples of files/dirs that could earlier only be viewed by running ls -a, but are now even visible in Nautilus are - .bashhistory, .git, .gitignore, .config etc.
I am not sure how this happened and could not find an option to revert this under Nautilus preferences menu.
Help in reverting to old system would be appreciated.