There are many different screen resolutions. Being able to adjust the application based on available space makes the application usable to more people.
In theory that sounds nice but in practice i haven't seen a single desktop application that can actually handle resolutions lower than whatever resolution the developer/designer used. I used a 1366x768 monitor for a long while ~3 years ago and everything looked both gigantic and had padding everywhere.
As for the web, responsive design was so great that in almost every site i had to zoom out to make it think i had a monitor with a bigger resolution than i really did.
These days and since i do not maximize the browser (because my monitor is huge - like all modern monitors that do not have awful image quality tend to be), i often have to resize the window because sites tend to think i'm using a mobile phone and instead of scaling down / hiding less important stuff (that would at least be appropriate for a narrower viewport) they make thing ultraginormous (because touch screens), overly padded out (because touch screens) and they hide all options behind a hamburger menu (because mobile screens are physically too small).
I'm certain there are theoretically ways to do it "right" (a friend web developer told me how but i forgot) but absolutely zero sites (that i visit) do that.
And it introduces new failure modes. I often experience responsive web applications hiding UI elements in my Firefox windows. Those windows usually use either the left or right have of a 28" 4k display. Why the heck do the hide the sidebar to save space? It is fucking annoying.