Excellent!
The real fix is to change the “visibility” of the Center GTK Box - from visible to invisible.
You can test this by running:
GTK_DEBUG=interactive budgie-panel --replace
Then navigating to the center GTKBox for the panel and changing the visibility property.
The code is here https://github.com/solus-project/budgie-desktop/blob/master/src/panel/panel.vala - so at the bit that populates the panel it needs to say “and finally are there any more child objects in the GTKBox - if not, then set the visibility property to hidden”
Anyway - the above is useful for anyone who wants to have a try “hacking” the desktop code. Happy to include any small patch developed to resolve this for all (ubuntu and anyone else interested)budgie desktop users