Mojave desktop has suddenly become hidden in Finder.

Thank you for your reply.

Please pardon my ignorance. To be honest, I'm not totally certain how iCloud Drive works. I've been using the iCloud Drive to manually store specific items I want shared among my devices. It saves me the trouble of file transfers and redundancy. I've been accessing those items via an icon link to one of the iCloud Drive folders placed under the Favorites category in my Finder window's sidebar.

Now there seems to be a new category in the sidebar named iCloud with an icon named iCloud Drive under it. Despite the hide/show feature for the contents of a category, I don't recall ever seeing the iCloud category listed before.

How do I determine whether iCloud Drive is enabled, why is it relevant and how can I fix my problem? Your assistance would be much appreciated.

As mentioned earlier, I can sort of unhide the desktop files with Shift+Cmd+., although they are dimmed. While in list view, I notice something when I expand those dimmed folders. Those that ought to be hidden, show their contents (files and subdirectories) also as dimmed. On the other hand, folders that ought to be unhidden, show their contents normally ,despite that the folder itself remains dimmed. Perhaps knowing this can be helpful?

I went to my System Preferences/iCloud and saw that "iCLoud Drive" is checked. When I display the options, "Desktop and Documents Folders" is unchecked.

At iCloud.com, I do see the same files and folders as what appears in the iCloud drive directory on my desktop, but the desktop files are not there.

Thank you for replying.

It seems to me that figuring out how to change the attribute won't solve the issue. Whether I create a new file, or restore TimeMachine backups files to the desktop directory, the items will only be visible temporarily. Upon rebooting, anything that was visible in the desktop directory become hidden.

I could be wrong, but I think this suggests that a persistently recurring process or command needs to be disabled. Perhaps something with one of the start up items? I wonder if the logs in the console can provide a clue.