Part of the Growth team's "newcomer tasks" project includes guiding newcomers to complete suggested edits once they are in the editor. We plan to use the help panel feature to do this, and to have the help panel open for newcomers when they first click edit after arriving from the suggested edits module. At that first moment, we don't want any other popups to appear, as that would make it unclear as to where the newcomer is supposed to pay attention -- we want all their onboarding to happen in the help panel.
Therefore, the Growth team needs the ability to suppress popups that come from the editor for specific users that arrive on articles via the suggested edits module.
We know that some popups are caused by the editor itself, and some come from notifications or other sources -- but we're not sure which ones. The work in T229887: Audit notifications received by new users upon opening the editor taught us some more about this. It now sounds like it is possible to build a hook to suppress popups that come from the Visual Editor, but not to automatically suppress every type of popup at the moment of arriving and initiating the editor. What we want to do is build the hook for suppressing Visual Editor popups, and then see what other popups still appear in our target wikis. We'll deal with those separately.
Note that this suppression also includes the pulsing blue dots that appear on the "Add link" and "Add citation" buttons in the VE toolbar.
This work is needed in order for the Growth team to release Newcomer Tasks 1.2, which is planned for March.