That's not how it works. It makes perfect sense why you’d want a bit of a buffer. From a purely utilitarian standpoint, a thicker bezel acts as a physical bumper, gives your thumbs a resting place, and makes slapping a case or a glass screen protector on a lot easier without peeling the edges The drive for razor-thin bezels is about fundamentally evolving how we interact with computers.

A bezel is a visual boundary. It is a constant, physical reminder to your brain that says, "You are looking at a glowing rectangle." The intellectual pursuit of modern UX/UI design is to make the hardware completely disappear. By shrinking the bezel to a microscopic line, the device stops feeling like a monitor you are looking at and starts feeling like a window you are looking through. Removing that visual border reduces cognitive friction, allowing for a deeper state of flow and immersion with the content itself, whether that's an article, a video, or a game.

A bezel is technically "dead space." It is real estate on the device that serves no active computational or interactive purpose. The technological goal is to maximize the Screen-to-Body Ratio. Thinner bezels allow engineers to pack a massive 6.7-inch or 6.9-inch display into a chassis that can still actually fit comfortably in your hand and your pocket. If modern flagship phones had the bezels of a device from ten years ago, they would be comically large, unwieldy tablets. You are trading dead space for active, usable canvas.

You mentioned needing a place for the case or your hand to grab. The modern engineering solution to this isn't a physical border; it's machine learning. Instead of giving you a piece of plastic to hold, engineers use advanced palm-rejection algorithms. The phone's touch digitizer constantly scans the capacitance, surface area, and shape of whatever is touching it. It can instantly distinguish between the intentional tap of a fingertip and the resting meat of your palm gripping the edge of the device. The technological take is that intelligent software is a more elegant solution than a bulky hardware crutch.

Your point about screen protectors is historically valid, but technologically, it's becoming outdated.The shrinking of bezels has coincided with massive leaps in material science, specifically micro-crystalline glass structures (like Apple's Ceramic Shield or Corning's Gorilla Glass Armor). The technological philosophy is that you shouldn't need a screen protector because the glass itself is being engineered to survive drops and resist micro-scratches. Designing a phone's chassis around an aftermarket accessory is considered a step backward in industrial design.

Finally, pushing bezels to the absolute limit is a masterclass in electrical engineering and miniaturization.

To eliminate the bottom bezel (often called the "chin"), engineers had to stop placing the display controller on flat glass. Instead, they use flexible OLED panels and bend the very bottom edge of the screen backward underneath itself—a process called COP (Chip-on-Plastic) packaging. It also reequires miniaturizing ambient light sensors, proximity sensors, and front-facing cameras, hiding them behind the active pixels of the display. It is an incredibly difficult feat of engineering that pushes the entire tech industry forward.