Horizontal layout is not ergonomic
Sorry, I'm not sure if out of the hundreds of projects at gnome.org which is the right one. This is my best guess.
I just upgraded to Fedora 34 and I believe that is using GNOME 4.0. One critical issue is the icons are now on the bottom instead of the side. This is due to the new vertical layout. The problem is this more than doubles the amount of mouse movement needed to open an application. My hands are stressed by using both keyboards and mouse. I use very expensive ergonomic equipment to reduce this. But when there is a change like this my hands simply cannot take it, and this will quickly put me back to wearing braces.
Why is it non-ergonomic? First I have to move my mouse all the way to upper left corner of my monitor to activate the icon bar at the bottom. Now I have to move all the way to the bottom of the screen to click the icon. Now I have to move mouse to the location on the screen where the new application has opened.
This seemingly simply change to the UI has increased the stress on my hands by a factor of 3.
Now I could say try and use the Windows key instead, and reduce that activation step. But it still requires toggling from keyboard to mouse. And the windows key is not in a place on any keyboard where it can be pressed without removing my hands from the keyboard, or stretching my fingers in ways fingers are not intended to be stretched. So that still increases the stress on my hands.
The vertical layout was much less stress, because once I moved the mouse over the icon was much closer to the activation zone. And the window would open up near to where my mouse was to the activation zone.
I did find an extension to "fix" this:
https://github.com/RensAlthuis/vertical-overview
But sadly the extension stopped upon my first 'dnf update' and I cannot get it to work again.
Accessibility should not require an extension. Good ergonomic UI design should not require an extension.