I actually really like not having icons on the desktop in gnome. It always ends up a collection of random garbage anyway after some time and Icd rather have that in my home directory. Now i can just press my keyboard shortcut to hide all windows and then I have a clean screen with nothing distracting me.
Depends on what you want to do I guess. I’d rather have a clean desktop that cannot accumulate clutter like in windows where applications add shortcuts to the desktop automatically which you then have to remove manually.