With the proliferation of gtag.js implementations, we can see that there’s a small-ish paradigm shift in how to implement Google’s stack of marketing tools.
As adding gtag.js snippets to the site code becomes more and more common (to cater to things like early Optimize loading), you might be at a point where you have lots of interesting information stored in the gtag.js queue but no way to access it in your Google Tag Manager tags and variables.