True, Gnome is an exercises in lack of polish (or worse, quirky behaviour usually justified by some very weird way of thinking that doesn't match 99% of other people)
It's not that the Gnome team gets features wrong (every desktop software project does that) it's that they absolutely insist on dying on every single interface hill they find themselves on.
If you'll indulge me an anecdote, my first KDE experience was noticing the icons were too small, setting fractional scaling, and watching the entire desktop bug out requiring several restarts. I immediately switched to GNOME, noticed fractional scaling wasn't an option (by default), and just left the small icons alone - which I've now gotten used to.
I think that's a good allegory for the philosophy behind an opinionated desktop.
You know, I was ready to disagree but then it dawned on me that i don't use any of the pack-in software that comes with gnome (the desktop). My workflow largely depends on other tools (which might use gnome libs truth be told), but i could probably change my session manager, desktop, window manager and the like with fewer papercuts than i think.