It's worth mentioning that GNOME receives an enormous amount of hate but it's still the most widely used DE on Linux by a mile and the vast, vast, vast majority of people get along just fine.
> It's the default on Ubuntu and RHEL, which are the two most popular enterprise distros.
For servers; that's not super compelling.
> Ubuntu is also the most popular consumer Linux distro.
That's a much stronger argument, though I'd point out that Linux distros are disproportionally used by people given to customization, so the default may not be as important.
GNOME is very opinionated in its design, it's bound to draw ire. It's the more stable DE out of it and KDE, and the way they handle releases is more friendly to the enterprisey types.
Say what? Half the reason cosmic even became a project at all was the gnome releases constantly breaking plugins and extensions.
It seems reasonably stable and usually just works (except the files app), but only if you do absolutely nothing to it. Try to change anything and it becomes nightmarish.
Stable not in terms of extensions (they really need to get better at that), but in that if a feature doesn't make a version it gets pushed to the next one. A given version of GNOME is typically very stable in my experience, so long, as you said, you don't touch it. A server with a GUI it not likely something I am going to spend a lot of time mucking with the file manager. And I'm with you on the Files app, it is my least favorite part of GNOME. I typically use KDE, but in RHEL environments GNOME is the assumed DE.