alt Hacker NewsNo, but imagine doing all the work to collect up a list of files that failed only to say, pop a modal at the end of the process that coincides with the user hitting Enter because they were multitasking and it auto-accepts the dialog. Information gone, context lost, in fact your entire design has failed to change the experience at all! All because of one UI overlap that's actually very common.
We have shared workstations for example where this would be a typical use case for non-tecchnical users across multiple user logins: ensuring you can check that the big data transfer was complete a few hours later would be very useful, but if you only do a fraction of the work for completeness then again, it's of no benefit.
Yes. The entire reason DEs expect people to dismiss those dialogs is because they are modal. And there's no reason at all for them to be modal.
KDE even got an entire notifications application, and discovered that it's bad to make them modal. But didn't move away from the idea of dismissing them on any interaction, it still acts like it's a modal.