Those people of Gnome are getting wiser. They took it a while tought:

From GNOME 3.26, we are therefore planning not to show status icons in GNOME Shell by default. We feel that, long-term, this change will enable us to provide a better experience for our users (I’ll go into some detail about this in the rest of the post). We also feel that the consequences of the change won’t be as dramatic as they would have been in the past.

We do recognise that people are using status icons today and that some will continue to want to use them. That’s absolutely fine, and our decision to stop showing status icons by default is in no way a negative judgement on this. If you want or need to continue using status icons, you should feel free to use the TopIcons GNOME Shell extension. This will continue to work and the extension offers a better status icon experience than the current default anyway.

From: Status Icons and GNOME – Form and Function

They plan to change a basic UI feature that have there since almost forever – status icons were already there in Gnome 0.x – but they realized that not everyone will want to follow them and they while changing the default behaviour they still allow for the old way.

They do have become wiser. I’m positively touched.