I was looking for a way to hide the status bar, and eventually I discovered that there is an awesome plugin called Hider that enables toggling on/off the visibility of the status bar, the app ribbon, the title bar, the scrollbars, and tooltips. The plugin can be installed from within Obsidian via “Community plugins”.
(The same functionality is also incorporated into the Minimal Theme, which is by the same developer.)
I’m posting about this here just so that it’s documented in the forum, in case anyone else searches the forum for how to hide the status bar.
Many thanks to @Kepano!