> There's a reason Dash to Dock and AppIndicator are packaged by default on most Gnome distros

Back when I still had a need for it it was solely because some apps do not have proper support for missing tray icons (you can only fully close them via the tray icon), not because I actually like the feature.

I appreciate that GNOME tries to move on from this. Unfortunately it doesn't have the market control that Windows has, so not all app developers follow suit.