Earlier quoted context omitted.
You think so? https://blogs.gnome.org/aday/2014/08/27/gnome-design-saving-...
But this post compares against GNOME 2.x, which was equally awful about wasting space. It doesn't compare against Windows or OS X, which are much better with screen real estate and let you easily hide the taskbar or dock to recover more.
From the blog post:
> What’s more, today’s Nautilus compares favourably with file managers from other operating systems/desktop environments. KDE’s Dolphin uses 109 vertical pixels of chrome compared with Nautilus’s 48. Finder in the upcoming OS X version seems to have around 75 pixels.