How to prevent macOS from putting icons on some areas of the desktop?
What about creating a smart folder “Desktop” and put it onto your sidebar. Try omitting parameters like show only files larger than 1kb. If you go to more options/show more from the query menu in finder... you can add a ton of parameters including “raw” query. Raw can be used to make some really complicated and effective searches. I think you can even extract the raw query from a saved smart folder.