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.

Does the pen work probably in drawing or journal software (like Krita and Xournal++)?

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).