First of all, this is not a duplicate of this question because that discussion took a detour. In there, the guy basically asked "how to get rid of the tray icon" and people answered "how to have the drives not appear within the list" instead, something much more complicated and beyond the point if you ask me.
Now, on Windows 10, maybe for the reasons covered in that question, the internal SATA hard drives are listed under that list when you click the aforementioned icon. But, as someone said there, no regular desktop-home-Windows-user would normally want to disconnect his hard drives on the fly. The icon and underlying list was useful when it served solely as a USB-drive stopper.
But a USB drive, on the rare occasions I plug one into my PC, can be ejected by going to File Explorer, then right-clicking the device, then 'eject'. The way I see it, the icon in the tray area is just taking space. And no, simply hiding it the conventional way is not good; I prefer to have all my resident apps shown; if I see the "show more arrow", I will always be uncomfortable wondering "what else is in here?"
So how do I get rid of that icon for good?