Sharepoint - Activating Modern layout on SharePoint Online

After Microsoft released the GA Drop of SPFx, which means Modern Sites are now available on all tenants. I tried to play around with it. The first thing for me was to create a new Modern Team site. So as a common practice I navigated to SharePoint Admin, and created a new site collection, to my surprise the UI was classic but had ability to create modern pages.

This was very confusing to me, then I read an article by Chris O'Brien here. In the second paragraph he has mentioned below words

"As a reminder, any SharePoint site that is attached to an Office 365 Group is a modern site, and any old SharePoint Online site that has existed for a long time now has modern pages (it’s the default now when a new page is created)."

So to fulfill above condition i.e. site attached to O365 group. You can confirm below 2 things

1. On your SharePoint Admin's settings page (https://yourtenant-admin.sharepoint.com/_layouts/15/online/TenantSettings.aspx), allow users to create sites.
2. Secondly navigate to SharePoint home page https://yourtenant.sharepoint.com/_layouts/15/sharepoint.aspx and create sites. These will be modern ones.

Note: This is my experience, there can be other ways and work around.

You can create a Modern site using the below url ( kinda like workaround):

https://tenantname.sharepoint.com/_layouts/15/creategroup.aspx

This will create a team site with group.

This is what i view in my tenant, its set to first release for all users. But i think it should work on all tenants irrespective of the release preferences.

Reference - Create connected SharePoint Online team sites in seconds

Also, if you go to the url:

https://tenantname.sharepoint.com/_layouts/15/sharepoint.aspx

There you have the option to create "Modern" site:

Note - both these options (urls) bypass the policy settings. As of now every user is able to create these sites. So, do keep a watch on the storage quotas.