Has anybody built a UI around the opposite? Shrinking?

ie rather that zooming in on the content of interest, shrinking the content not of interest?

Long time ago I used to use https://www.windowmaker.org/ as my X11 window manager and one of the features I really liked was the ability to shrink a window to an icon and place that icon on the desktop for future retrieval ( a bit like having the whole desktop like the MacOS dock ).

I find such an interface easier to navigate than one where you zoom in and out - where the it's too easy to lose overall context, and where navigation is a bit too linear/hierarchical.