I'm using Gnome shell since the early days and, so far, I'm very happy with it. But, then, I also use macOS on my Macs and I'm very happy with them too. All of them run everything I throw at them just fine.

I find the lack of options to customize GNOME irrelevant - I'm way past the day I cared about the wallpaper or the icons or the colors of the window chrome. I pay attention to what's inside the window, not its border.

The other day I fired up a Solaris 10 VM so I could give Wikipedia a proper Solaris/CDE screenshot and I was surprised it's actually still usable - the terminals are responsive and the rest, oh well... You don't want to use a GUI to copy files, do you?

Easy, Red-Hat used to pay the salaries for a big chunk of GTK/GNOME developers.

GNOME 3 is also far from universally deemed unusable, (I use it daily with great success), despite what the propaganda would have you believe.

I tried to use GNOME 3 after Ubuntu dropped Unity, and it never performed like Unity, hence I am now using XFCE.

The latest updates, show there is still work left to do in this area,

https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/monday-25th-february-2019/995...

Pretty much this, I'd say. I know people who like its design and find it very comfortable. I'm definitely not one of them but fortunately no one heeded the calls to just build one desktop environment to rule them all :).