>GNOME generally is rather odd, even if it's one of the more polished options. It strikes me more as a somewhat-desktop-adapted iOS than it does macOS.
That's because Gnome has to fulfill different responsibilities as a toolkit. It has to accommodate for touch-enabled devices, which pads out the UI quite a bit. It takes some getting used to, but I think I'm finally quite into it. It does a nice job of maximizing the actionable area of your window without sacrificing usability, uniformity or screen space. Compared to Big Sur's design language, the Gnome devs are already quite pretty far ahead of the game in my opinion. Gnome 40[2] positions the DE in a pretty good spot for the next several years, too.
[1] https://github.com/helloSystem/hello [2] https://forty.gnome.org/
There's also a huge pile of small features that go beyond the scope of a comment to list, which are either implemented inconsistently or not at all. For example, in GNOME and Pantheon, window minimization is disabled by default and even when enabled lacks integration with whatever dock you may be using.
GNOME generally is rather odd, even if it's one of the more polished options. It strikes me more as a somewhat-desktop-adapted iOS than it does macOS.