WooCommerce SHOP page - hiding products from a category but NOT sitewide

I have been struggling to find how to accomplish this. I would like to hide products from one (or several) categories on the MAIN SHOP page but not hide them in their individual category pages. I have found solutions to hide the categories but it always makes them invisible on their category pages, as well... which I do not want.

The reason is that this one particular category will have thousands of prodicts which I do not what to overwhelm and hide the other more varied items.

The function you want to use is is_shop(). This function checks if you're on the main shop page. And will not trigger on other product archives.

If you use this in combination with the 'pre_get_posts' filter. You can exclude product categories by modifying the query.

An example where i exclude products with the category 'nice' from the main shop page:

function exclude_product_cats_from_shop_page( $query ) {
    if ( ! is_admin() && $query->is_main_query() && is_shop() ) {
        // For example: Exclude the category slug 'nice' from the shop page
        $query->set( 'tax_query', array(
            array(
                'taxonomy' => 'product_cat',
                'field'    => 'slug',
                'terms'    => 'nice',
                'operator' => 'NOT IN',
            ),
        ) );
    }
}
add_action( 'pre_get_posts', 'exclude_product_cats_from_shop_page' );