Hey @jserene 
I’m using 12.1.1 and I’m not seeing the Collection collapsing each time a request is added to the Collection.
I think that the behaviour of the filter and having text still in the field, could be causing it to close though.
Once the request is created, the filter is reducing the view in the sidebar to only show what matches and as the request doesn’t match, it hides it.
There looks to be a couple more highlight based issues looking at this as the active tab is not always highlighted in the sidebar.