IDK, I've found Gnome unusable for a long time. I tried to make up for it with extensions for a while, but every release would unapologetically break something I found essential and the extension devs would give up trying to keep them going.
I understand that eventually they got better about dropping breaking changes without warning, because extension devs were leaving in droves, but at that point KDE got good again with Plasma, and I've never looked back.
Gnome has their vision to be a completely hands off, dumbed-down, unbreakable DE for the lowest common denominator. I guess judged by that light, it's a success. It's the default in a lot of distros because it's low maintenance for packaging and support. Frankly, I think it's a major reason for the slow speed of Linux desktop uptake, but what do I know.