alt Hacker NewsFull screen hides distractions from other applications. Seems reasonable as something minimal.
Minimalism is a difficult subject. In art, minimalists tried to strive for something that is universally minimal. But if you look in nature for straight lines or perfect circles, you end up disappointed. Turns out minimalism found things that were minimal with respect to how some humans think about minimalism. For all we know, pure chaos may be more universally minimal than an empty vacuum.
You seem to misunderstand what full screen mode is. It doesn't just make the terminal fullscreen, it causes pi to maintain its own scrollback buffer and a UI around it, rather than letting the terminal emulator handle scrolling (ie, letting the session context actually live in the terminal history)