Tell me why it's the "Right Way".
My eyes have muscles that allow me to move them where required. Most people do. They don't need the entire desktop blanked out for a single UI element that might take up ~10% of the space.
Again, we're right back to mobile-first use cases- everything is fullscreen. Except that nobody is using G3 on mobile devices, so why design in that fashion? What's the user benefit?
Of course, that may be due to familiarity. My primary platform is a mobile device, but I also use Gnome 3 (Fedora) on desktops. We use Mate on RHEL 7 on our larger display configurations (4x4K monitor in a 2x2 grid and 3x4K in horizontal configurations). But, on those configurations, we lock down and don't offer start menus to the end-user at all (kiosk style application).
I do like Gnome 3 for general use, though.