I do this mainly because I would get motion sickness from UI animation. Not trolling, see how most mainstream OS developers added disabling animation as an accessibility option.

I heard from somewhere that you can get the whole collection down to below 120GB if you compress all variants of a game into solid archive.

I switched to Pear Launcher. Pretty affordable and doesn’t request network connection permission. It’s not as feature rich as Nova but it fulfills my needs. You can assign swipe up gesture on app icon (but not swipe down and not on folder).