I found it! I can reproduce the issue, it's not random, we can open a bug report. It happens if you focus another window with the mouse, than even though you can focus the window with touch, the button won't work there.

The button works this way:

1. Click on the header of the Console window with mouse
2. Touching the menu button works on the Console window.
3. Touching on any other menu buttons on different windows doesn't work.

The button doesn't work this way:

1. Click to any other window or just on the empty desktop with mouse
2. You can focus the window with touch, but the button doesn't work.

So in other words, it works only, if you focused the window with mouse previously. I can't see anything related to this in the logs. Please try to reproduce.

I'm still on Gnome 44, I would wait until I get Gnome 45, to see if maybe they fixed this.

I have an old touchscreen lenvo yoga, I use it with gnome and never noticed this. Checked it for this post, and it behaves the same way :) I use the touchscreen only for scrolling webpages, never wanted to touch buttons on the header, I never use it as a tablet, always in laptop mode.

Played a bit and I could reproduce the issue, in multiple apps, but I don't know when it happens. Also when it stops registering the touches it also stops registering touchpad clicks on the header buttons, so I guess it's not a touch only issue, I cannot even click on that ellipsis button with the touchpad anymore. Making the app fullscreen solves it sometimes, also opening the activities overview helped sometimes.

It seems totally random when it happens.