Back in 2009, changing display settings could easily leave you in a configuration that's incompatible with your hardware. So, gnome-settings-daemon would show a confirmation dialog, and automatically revert any changes 20 seconds later.
In 2013, things were still a bit buggy and broken. And we were still on X11. So we just moved this confirmation dialog into gnome-shell.
Now in 2025 the situation is notably better. The kernel won't let you set a mode that's not supported by the hardware. Display configuration basically never fails. And gnome-control-center has protections in place to prevent the user from soft-locking themself with a valid-but-self-defeating configuration (i.e. by turning off all outputs).
Meanwhile, we've got a short timeout on a dialog. To comply with WCAG accessibility standards (relevant snippets here), we'd either need to make the timeout configurable or remove it completely. I suggest we just remove it.
This is the downstream bug for https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/-/issues/8459