See, while I understand that the "the system should be invisible and get out of the way so people can do things with their computers" philosophy isn't for me, I entirely understand it as not only valid, but preferred by most people. --
-- It's just that Gnome's approach to "getting out of the way" is at best counterproductive? I used Gnome for like 3 months in 2022, figured I'd give it a try, I'm always down to try new stuff. And I felt like I was just constantly fighting against it, having to do configuration stuff and install third-party addons not as a funtime activity because I like to make my computer look prettier, but because if I didn't, shit just refused to work. It was only much later that I learned that the reason I had to keep wrestling Gnome is because the peeps behind it had actively decided that the things I needed to do were stupid and didn't need doing.
You'll see me praising Cinnamon in a different comment. Cinnamon, a cousin of Gnome's born of Gnome 2, is what I'd call a DE that gets out of the way. It doesn't have all the moving parts that KDE does, and that is to its credit. Because it has everything it needs to have and no more but also no less.