What blows me away is that this is 2020 and iOS still won't let you place icons anywhere you want on your screen. It's not just that you're not allowed to make your home screen look the way you want it, it's that even if you decide for a certain ordering, moving the icons in the right order is tougher than a sliding puzzle.
The way widgets are handled in iOS 14, I'll go so far as to say Apple decided this would never be available. It's all very automated now, the re-ordering of icon placements based on widget insertion, the folding and unfolding of "screens" based on the flow of icons to the next screen when widgets push an overflow.
You are describing how the broken way iOS handles icons works. Great. That was not my point. It's broken in the first place.
Do you know how many operating system developed in the past forty years don't allow users to position icons where they want?
There's just one: iOS.
I just don't understand the motivation behind this decision. It makes no sense.