>>105981735 (OP)
To be fair, desktop icons aren't that useful. In 15 years the only killer use i've had for them has been quickly launching different Firefox profiles, because launching them through the Profile manager sucks. And you don't even really NEED them, you can just launch Firefox with custom args through shell aliases/functions.
>>105984809
Desktop icons are good if you need to share a PC though. 90% of the overall population won't ever dig deeper than what's on the desktop, so you can leave launchers to anything you want them to use, and keep the rest basically inexistent from their PoV. The system tray is arguably a way more useful abstraction. It's a simple way to describe something that's complex or annoying for an end user to grasp (a process running in the background as a daemon)