Gnome Foundation is pushing very strongly to make the Desktop Environment most resemble Mobile Apps... I'm not speculating here. They have said this.
They would prefer to have all window borders, scrollbars, toolbars, menubars, close/min/max buttons all removed entirely.
And... in GTK4, much of that has been removed so far...
I know what you are thinking... "But wait... on mobile devices, the desktop is exclusively populated by icons."
It actually isn't, by the code. What you see on a mobile device with all the icons is more akin to the Gnome Activities Overview.
The actual analogy of the desktop on a mobile device is generally blank.